Why School Often Feels Stupid (And What Parents Can Do About It)
Last Tuesday, I pulled up to the elementary school pickup line and found my 10-year-old, Jax, slouched into the backseat with a crumpled math worksheet pressed into the door panel. A half-eaten blue raspberry fruit snack was stuck to the bottom corner, his hoodie was inside out, and he’d kicked off one of his sneakers somewhere between the playground and the car. When I asked how his day was, he flipped the worksheet around to show me: 28 out of 30 multiplication problems correct, a big red 10/30 scrawled across the top, and a note that read “No work shown.”
“I did it all in my head,” he said, kicking the back of my seat. “I got almost all of them right. Why do I need to write every stupid step down?”
Idling at the stoplight a block from school, I smelled the stale french fry that’s been rolling around under my passenger seat for two weeks, and I thought exactly what he was thinking: Why the fuck is this so stupid.
This isn’t an isolated meltdown over homework. Last month, Jax got a check minus on his monthly reading log because he’d finished three entire Percy Jackson graphic novels in two weeks, but forgot to write a three-sentence summary for every 20-minute reading block. He’d been too excited to finish the book to stop and jot down summaries. Two weeks before that, he had to cut out and paste 12 different kinds of clouds onto a poster for science class, even though he’d already aced the unit test and can name every cloud type on a family hike.
I like Jax’s teacher, Ms. Lopez. She’s great with the kids, and during our last parent-teacher conference, she pulled me aside after the formal meeting to complain about all the same rules. The 30-problem requirement is district policy. The reading log summaries are a mandate from the literacy coach. If she doesn’t enforce it, she gets marked down on her annual evaluation. This isn’t on teachers. It’s on a system that prioritizes uniform, measurable compliance over actual, messy learning.
What gets me isn’t the occasional stupid assignment. It’s that so much of what kids do every day isn’t about learning at all. It’s about training them to follow arbitrary rules even when they don’t make sense, even when they get in the way of actually mastering something. If a kid can do multiplication correctly in their head, that’s not a problem that needs fixing. That’s a skill we should be celebrating. Instead, we punish them for not jumping through a meaningless hoop.
I used to just brush Jax off when he ranted like this. I’d say “Well, rules are rules, you have to do it anyway” or “The teacher knows what’s best.” But that only made him shut down, stop talking about school, and start thinking all learning was just stupid hoops. I realized I wasn’t helping anyone by just going along with the nonsense, so I started trying small, low-friction changes that work for us.
First, when he comes home mad about a dumb assignment, I don’t defend the school first. I just say, “That does sound really dumb. I’d be mad too.” That’s it. No lecture, no immediate fix, just validation. Before I started doing this, Jax would hold all his frustration in and end up snapping at his little sister over nothing 10 minutes later. Now he just vents for a minute, and we move on to talking about his robotics club or the new comic he’s drawing.
Second, I write a lot of quick, polite notes on assignments, and I pick my battles. For that 10/30 math worksheet, I just scribbled on the bottom in pen: “Jax solved all these correctly mentally, he understands the concept. We chose to spend homework time working on his robot build instead of rewriting steps. Thanks for understanding.” Ms. Lopez gave him full credit. Last week, when the cloud poster was due the same night he had a robotics competition, I wrote a note that said “He can name all 12 clouds from memory, ask him anytime. We skipped the cutting and pasting to make it to the event.” No pushback. Most teachers are dying for parents to take this approach, because they don’t want to grade 30 half-assed cloud posters any more than our kids want to make them.
Third, if an assignment is just repeated busywork, I let Jax cut it in half. If he has 30 identical multiplication problems and he gets the first five right, he can do 10 and stop. We use the extra 20 minutes for whatever he actually cares about: building robots, drawing comic books, climbing trees in the backyard. That time is way better spent than repeating a skill he already mastered 25 more times.
I know some people will say this is teaching kids to skip out on hard things, that they need to learn to follow rules. But the hard things worth learning are things that matter: cleaning up your mess, being kind when you’re mad, working through a problem you don’t understand. There’s no useful lesson in repeating 25 extra math problems just because a rule says so. The only lesson that teaches is that authority is always right even when it’s wrong, and that being correct doesn’t matter if you don’t check all the boxes. That’s not a lesson I want my kid to learn.
It’s not perfect. We still have stupid assignments every other week, and some days I give in and help Jax cut out clouds just to get it over with. The system isn’t going to change overnight, and I can’t rewrite district policy from my kitchen table. But I can make sure my kid doesn’t walk away thinking the point of school is to jump through stupid hoops. Right now, that’s enough. Most days, it works. Some days it doesn’t. It’s messy, it’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a whole lot better than making him hate learning just because the rules are stupid.
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