Teaching a Man (or a Boy) to Hire Someone Else to Catch the Fish For Him So He Can Play Fantasy Sports Online

For the past twelve years or so I have been working as a private tutor for fourth through twelfth graders primarily in the subject area of language arts and writing. I do this for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is that I love teaching, love getting kids excited about reading and writing, and working one-on-one this way instead of getting a full-time teaching job has afforded me flexibility to write, and now write and have and raise my children.

Most of the time, almost always in fact, I feel really good about the work I do with these kids and the relationships I develop with them. Every once in a while, however, I get a request from a student, or more often a parent, that surprises me in its inappropriateness, the assumption that of course I would slide into the realm of the unethical to help little son or daughter get the highest possible grade. I always say no, and express my displeasure in a subtle yet I hope unmistakable way, and it has happened so rarely that it has been easy to shake off when it does.

Lately, however, I have been thinking a lot about homework. I have been thinking of it partly in the context of being a parent, assessing how I feel, and why I feel this way, about homework in terms of my own children, and partly because it is such a massive topic of discussion among anyone who works in schools. There is just so, so much of it now, and it starts getting dished out so, so early. But from where I'm sitting, that's not even the problem.

I have many memories involving homework from my homework days as a kid, primarily from seventh grade through twelfth. Many of them involve me lying on my back in my bed with an open book on my stomach, drool collecting in the corner of my mouth as I slept. A scene of me waking up at 6 in the morning and realizing I had fallen asleep (Hmm. I wonder why?) while "doing my homework" could be played over and over again as in the Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day. I was also a big fan of the "getting together to do homework with friends" model, the doing homework in the car on the way to school model, the doing homework in the library between classes model, and the simple yet effective stance of passive resistance as demonstrated so beautifully by Martin Luther King and a number of my high school classmates who shall remain nameless of: not doing homework.

What I have few memories of are my parents doing my homework. This is because, well, it never happened. In the evenings when I was writing sonnets to my friend Kate in the voice of a senior boy named Rob, my parents were sipping chardonnay with their friends while eating cheese and crackers and laughing raucously in the living room (Mom), grading papers (Mom, again), doing projects on behalf of her school or one of ours (Mom, again, again) or watching sports on the TV in the den (Dad).

Don't get me wrong. They would have helped, did help, if I asked, but asking would have required a level of involvement in the homework that I think I have made it clear I was unwilling to give. My mother pitched in on craft projects, anything with an artistic component. My dad grilled me on vocabulary words in preparation for the SAT as we rode back and forth to the Boston Garden, home of the then World Champion Boston Celtics. I have a cousin and an uncle I called in the case of math emergencies. But that was it. The homework I did, I did myself. I'm not sure if I knew what a tutor was, exactly. I never went to an SAT prep class, although I think I had a practice test book. I didn't know anybody who did.

At the schools I work in, private and selective publics in Manhattan, more kids than not have tutors, and many of then have two or three. This is not just a New York thing. I know firsthand that it is almost as much a fabric of high school life these days in Boston and San Francisco as it is here. So okay. It's an upper middle class thing. Fine. But it's pervasive, growing and--when you stop to think about it--really pretty disturbing how much it contributes to the growing divide between the have and have-nots. I am not talking about kids with learning needs whose parents can afford to get them supplemental assistance. I am talking about bright kids who are lazy (a type I know well) whose parents don't want their laziness to keep them out of Princeton.

I have never once heard a parent speculate to me if the tutoring assistance I--or one of the family's other employed educational staff--provide to their child is necessary. Or useful. The word I hear is effective, as in getting results. Now I don't do this, although plenty of people I know do--it's a decent living. I am referring to the class of tutoring known as "homework help." Homework help? I thought the entire point was to do the work, at home, by yourself. When I was a kid, if desperate, it was acceptable to bond a little with a parent who hadn't seen a trigonometry textbook in twenty years and beg them for a little help, knowing there would be some grimaces, wrinkled brows and ultimately the "have you tried calling Uncle Karl?" response.

But this cowardly new world in which parents are exempt from even peripheral participation in their children's academic life (I am not talking about those parents who for reasons either fiscal or vain actually do the child's homework themselves--they're out there too)--I don't know. It strikes me as verging on insane that schools are requiring teachers to give more and more homework, parents are hiring tutors to help the kids do it, and the parents who can afford the better help have kids who get better grades and go onto better colleges. It's like Donald Trump is running the school system. It's capitalism at its worst. I hear the "but if you have the money, why not spend it on your kids and their education" argument all the time. I'm not buying it in the context of tutoring.

I don't want to be part of this problem. I make a point not to be part of this problem. But I'm expensive. And I'm good. So as much I can feel good about the work I do with the kids I work with, I need to think a little more about the ramifications. It doesn't negate the bad to do some volunteer tutoring with kids whose parents can't afford it, which I do, too, although it makes a little inroad, no? Anyway. That's all for now. More on this later, I think.