What I Would Do to my Math Homework

Math, I understand that you're important. Without you, there wouldn't be much going on in this world- we'd be stuck in the stone ages! With that said, however... I hate you.

Now, don't take too much offense to this. It's not your existance that I hate- it's how you're forced upon me against my will.

For example, this weekend my lovely math teacher assigned me some questions about multiplying and dividing polynomials. There a a couple reasons that I have a problem with this, the main ones being that...

1. I highly doubt that I'll actually need to use this knowledge more then a half dozen times in my life, and

2. The math homework is basicallly the exact same question asked over and over again.

I suppose that the latter reason is the main reason why I'm so against this math homework. I can see my math teacher giving me, say... ten questions on the material. That way we'd get one or two questions on every concept we've learned in this chapter. Surely that number of questions would suffice if my teacher then went over them with us and showed us what we did wrong?

I think it would be, but apparently my teacher doesn't think so. Instead we get around forty or so questions, all on the same few topics. I understood the material after just one or two questions on the subject! Do we really need more?

And then the worst part of all of this is, when the homework is checked, it hardly even counts as a "checking." What it really is is a few seconds glance at the work to make sure that there's enough writing and equations to qualify as "sufficient work."

How are we going to learn if our work isn't even checked to see if we're doing it right? Are we supposed to learn only when our test results get back to show us what concepts we mistinterpreted? And if so, then what's the point of the textbook work?

If I could do so without disapproving glances from everyone I knew, then this is what I'd do. I'd take my homework and put it... into a box. Then I'd put that box in another box, and mail that box to myself, and when it arrived... I'D BURN IT TO SMITHERINES!

Or, to save on postage, I could just, you know... burn it.

Thanks for reading,

-Mark