Homework Is A Waste Of Time Quotes

I’m not better, you know. The weight hasn’t left my head. I feel how easily I could fall back into it, lie down and not eat, waste my time and curse wasting my time, look at my homework and freak out and go and chill at Aaron’s, look at Nia and be jealous again, take the subway home and hope that it has an accident, go and get my bike and head to the Brooklyn Bridge. All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just… a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It’s not a very likely possibility.

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.

Stepfather—January 6, 1980 In addition to imitation mayonnaise, fake fur, sugar substitutes and plastic that wears like iron, the nuclear family has added another synthetic to its life: step-people. There are stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsons and stepdaughters. The reception they get is varied. Some are looked upon as relief pitchers who are brought in late but are optimistic enough to try to win the game. Some are regarded as double agents, who in the end will pay for their crimes. There are few generalizations you can make about step-people, except they’re all locked into an awkward family unit none of them are too crazy about. I know. I’ve been there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I became a hyphenated child a few years after my “real” father died. I was the only stepchild in North America to have a stepfather who had the gall to make me go to bed when I was sleepy, do homework before I went to school, and who yelled at me for wearing bedroom slippers in the snow. My real father wouldn’t have said that. My stepfather punished me for sassing my mother, wouldn’t allow me to waste food and wouldn’t let me spend money I didn’t have. My real father wouldn’t have done that. My stepfather remained silent when I slammed doors in his face, patient when I insisted my mother take “my side” and emotionless when I informed him he had no rights. My real father wouldn’t have taken that. My stepfather paid for my needs and my whims, was there through all my pain of growing up...and checked himself out of the VA hospital to give me away at my wedding. My real father...was there all the time, and I didn’t know it. What is a “real” mother, father, son or daughter? “Real” translates to something authentic, genuine, permanent. Something that exists. It has nothing to do with labor pains, history, memories or beginnings. All love begins with one day and builds. “Step” in the dictionary translates to “a short distance.” It’s shorter than you think.

Naomi doubted that any human being really understood math, they simply all pretended to have it down pat, when in truth they were every bit as confused by it as she was. Math was nothing but a giant hoax, and everyone participated in it, everyone faked belief in math so they could be done with hideous classes and the drudgery of the hateful homework and get on with life. The sun came up every morning, so the sun was real, and every time you inhaled you got the air you needed, so the atmosphere was obviously real, but half the time when you tried to use math to solve the simplest problem, the math absolutely would not work, which meant that it couldn't be real like the sun and the atmosphere. Math was a waste of time.

Which means that all cats are magical, even though their owners are probably not. Knowing this makes cats extremely confident and self-sufficient, and they put their magic to use all the time. How else could they appear from nowhere whenever the fridge door is opened? Or make a human open a door or window for them when they have a perfectly good cat flap of their own? Or seek out and snuggle up to the one person in the room who hates cats? Most of the time, cats don’t waste their energy displaying their superiority to non-magical humans. Occasionally they will, however, try to communicate with them — perhaps by staring at their subject for a very long time, or by sitting/standing/sleeping on whatever book/newspaper/homework that person might be occupied with, or by massaging that person’s leg/stomach/shoulder with very spiky claws while purring loudly.

I’d rather be lucky than good.’ [Baseball player] Lefty Gomez said that, and I live and breathe that fortune-dwelling, fuzzy-dice-dangling creed. I was fantastically lucky to be taken in by Montag Press and its extraordinary managing editor, Charlie Franco. But I’m also a bit of a research freak and I'm convinced that homework helped me set up a situation where luck could flash and ignite. I spent an inordinate amount of time researching small and independent imprints. Here I reveal the flip side of thinking that any hours spent researching literary agents is wasted (in my unwashed opinion) while time spent reading and learning about quality independent publishers is essential. It’s the best and only way to identify the little houses in that vibrant village that might be just right for your own book. (Interview with Ruuf Wangersen on sevencircumstances.com)

People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swaths of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.

RUSH HOUR   So many of us find the morning as a rush hour. Various family members scurry in different directions with various needs and diverse timetables. One has lost a sock; another can’t find last night’s homework. One needs a sack lunch; another needs lunch money. One leaves with a kiss, another with a shout, and another needs encouragement to open her eyes as she stumbles out the door. A “quiet time” in the morning to center ourselves and to renew our relationship with our Heavenly Father stands in sharp contrast. Carving out that time for yourself may be your supreme challenge of the day, but it is an effort worth its weight in gold, as so aptly stated by Bruce Fogarty: THE MORNING HOUR Alone with God, in quiet peace, From earthly cares, I find release; New strength I borrow for each day As there with God, I stop to pray. Alone with God, my sins confess’d, He speaks in mercy, I am blest. I know the kiss of pardon free, I talk to God, He talks to me. Alone with God, my vision clears, I see my guilt, the wasted years. I plead for grace to walk His way And live for Him, from day to day. Alone with God no sin between, His lovely face so plainly seen; My guilt all gone, my heart at rest With Christ, my Lord, my soul is blest. Lord, keep my life alone for Thee; From sin and self, Lord, set me free. And when no more this earth I trod, They’ll say, “He walked alone with God.”5   BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD; I WILL BE EXALTED AMONG THE NATIONS, I WILL BE EXALTED IN THE EARTH! PSALM 46:10 NKJV

The Guildhall was in the middle of Plano, Texas. Plano Texas, is brown and not much else. They have a Frito-Lay factory, parking lots, and a videogame school. At the time, I kept a strict vegan diet and didn’t drive. There was nothing to eat and nowhere to go. But the latter didn’t matter; when you were at the Guildhall you had no life outside the Guildhall. I remember the first day of orientation, sitting in a lecture hall with my future classmates and the spouses they’d brought with them to this wasted brown land. One of the other level design students had his wife and their year-old child with him. “Give her a kiss and say good-bye,” the director of the school told him in front of the assembly. “You’re not going to see her for two years.” I was in Plano, Texas, for six months. You’re at school from nine to five. You stay after and do your work with the teams they’ve assigned you to. Late at night you drag yourself home and do your actual homework. Maybe you get a few hours of sleep. The idea behind the school is that you’re always in what the Big Games Industry calls “crunch time”: unpaid overtime. Your masters want the game done by Christmas, so you don’t leave the office until it’s done. This is why people in the industry aren’t healthy; this is why they burn out and quit games within a few years. This is why you miss the second year of your daughter’s life. This is their scheme: you put up with crunch time all the time while you’re in school, so when you work for a big publisher—or, rather, a studio contracted by a big publisher—you won’t complain about being told you can’t see your daughter until the game’s done. The Guildhall boasts an over 90 percent employment rate, and it’s true: they will get you a job in the games industry. That’s because they will make you into exactly the kind of worker the games industry wants. It’s that kind of school. And it works; that’s the horrifying thing. My classmates were all self-identified gamers and game fans and were willing to put up with anything in order to live their dream of making videogames. That’s the carrot the industry dangles, and it’s what we take away from the industry when we create a form to which anyone can contribute. As long as the industry is allowed to continue acting as the gatekeeper to game creation, people will continue to accept the ways in which the industry tramples the lives and well-being of the creative people who make games, rather than challenging the insane level of control that publishers ask over developers’ lives.

Teachers, before you dole out yet another time-consuming assignment, run it through this Type I homework test by asking yourself three questions: • Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work? • Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class)? • Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged? If the answer to any of these questions is no, can you refashion the assignment? And parents, are you looking at homework assignments every so often to see whether they promote compliance or engagement? Let’s not waste our kids’ time on meaningless exercises. With a little thought and effort, we can turn homework into homelearning

Intelligent failures begin with preparation. No scientist wants to waste time or materials on experiments that have been run before and failed. Do your homework. The classic intelligent failure is hypothesis driven. You’ve taken the time to think through what might happen—why you have reason to believe that you could be right about what will happen.

Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.” It takes her a little time to get used to this idea. Ana’s accustomed to thinking of the digients as supremely gifted apes, and while in the past people have compared apes to children with special needs, it was always more of a metaphor. To view the digients more literally as special-needs children requires a shift in perspective. “How much responsibility do you think the digients can handle?” Derek spreads his hands. “I don’t know. In a way it’s like Down syndrome; it affects every person differently, so whenever my sister works with a new kid, she has to play it by ear. We have even less to go on, because no one’s ever raised digients for this long before. If it turns out that the only thing we’re accomplishing with homework assignments is making them feel bad, then of course we’ll stop. But I don’t want Marco and Polo’s potential to be wasted because I was afraid of pushing them a little.” She sees that Derek has a very different idea of high expectations than she has. More than that, she realizes that his is actually the better one. “You’re right,” she says, after a pause. “We should see if they can do homework.

If only you would apply yourself.” My teachers in high school told me that so often that they decided to really drill it in by writing it in my yearbook, over and over. I was a bad student. Still am. Busywork was the bane of my existence—those little homework assignments that felt like a waste of time, that required organizational skills like Writing Down Your Assignment and Not Losing Your Handout. These were difficult tasks for me. My locker was a pile of loose papers that got more and more crinkly as the weeks went on until it looked like the inside of a recycling bin. I discovered that if you ignore something long enough, it really does go away. Literally. The papers would disintegrate. I would pass just enough tests and do enough begging to eke by with a D. Sometimes.

It was the time of the change… no longer a little one, the time when, I was starting to see things happening, to me that I did not want to see. Like- passion pink braces on my unperfected overbite teeth along with ‘Pimples, periods, hips and boobs- oh my… I just want to cry or die.’ Moreover, I was utterly feeling all kinds of things that I didn’t want to feel. I was feeling too old for toys and wanted to feel up one of the older boys. I was an 8th grader, Yes, I was at that stage of my life… it feels strangely good and yet very weird too. ‘Oh yes- Live's through middle school all over again.’ All the days off. All the days on… all the days- I was turned off, to all of them. And yes, all the days, I was turned on! Yet, really can anyone stand to relive that day… I mean really! Let’s not forget I had to spend time with the family, on the brakes, then to come home and do all the pointless homework like advanced mathematics. When I got most of that crap done sitting in long study halls not able to move or say a sound, with period cramps, yeah- I know fun right! Kissing with open mouths, like breath sucking and tugs brushing Frenching. As well as thinking about what boy, I want to have sizzling, exhilarating, desiring sex with is all I thought about! Plus- when, where, and how! Yes, I have had some really bad kisses, make-outs, and hookups… who hasn’t? So much so, I barely survived through them the primary time it happened. Just like the world keeps going around, this was not my first go-around either. Frankly, I thought I would not have minded living through all that again. What I thought were the ultimate times of all. Like the time I made out with a girl in the hallway slammed upon her locker, she was touching me in all the right places, let us just say. Anyways her name is Jenny Stevenson. She is the type of girl that is a friend to try things with. Yes, I have been with a girl too. Mostly, I just wanted to see what being in a lesbian world feels like. It was okay, it feels just as good. Though, I knew boys were my thing. However, I am the type, I will try anything once, even sex-wise! Though I thought, my paramount triumphs were with Ray Raymond, and like when we first hooked up underneath the football stadium bleachers. I knew everyone could see us doing it with his pants down, and my bare butt sticking out and up, as the game was going on. Still, we were in the moment, we did not care. The PDA was half the fun of doing it, it was all about getting some. I remember being wasted too, with my friends like Jenny, Kenneth, and Madeline. Yet we just called her Maddie. Like- I said we got so drunk and high, that we went skinny dipping in like old man’s pool weather thirdly two degrees, and then made messed up looking snowman, and running around the street somewhat ass naked flashing whomever we would get to look at us.