So I am relieved when she tells me she doesn’t have much tonight. When I arrive home, a few minutes ahead of Esmee, I consider delaying my week of homework, but then I realize that Esmee can never put off her week of homework. I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings?īy late afternoon, I am tired after filing a magazine article on deadline. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school. Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed.

I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. There are standardized tests, and everyone-students, teachers, schools-is being evaluated on those tests. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Did you do your homework