My daughter is in second grade, and she has spent more time on homework these last couple days than I spent my entire senior year of high school. Now before you say something snide about my senior year of high school, remember that I got into a decent college – even after my senior year. However, I will admit I was something less than your model high school student (unless your model was something of a slacker, who specialized in “fitting in” assignments somewhere other than home, preferably between classes).

There’s a line I draw, which represents a reasonable amount of homework for a second grader; and Beth crossed it two hours ago. In fact, I’m tempted to do some of it for her. The only thing stopping me is that Beth will learn the wrong lesson from this experience, not to mention her teacher will probably be able to tell the difference.

I’m sure there’s another side to this story; that the teacher would have something to say about all of this. Ah, hell. Let her get her own blog!

After doing a search through my blog (I’m always paranoid that I’ve said the exact same thing before), I came across a completely unrelated entry. During the course of my quick scan, I wandered across the phrase, “stripping away the extra layers of bullshit.” What a wonderful phrase, one that has a number of appropriate applications this evening. Let’s see, there’s a layer that represents coloring, a layer that represents printing your full name and date, another layer that represents nonsensical repetitive tasks, I could go on and on.

Do you think Beth is too young for colorful metaphors? Perhaps she’s smart enough to have already figured out the concept, without the added color.