Why I Hate School

My feelings after spending 10 hours yesterday with my 9 year old, doing homework.

On today’s episode Russell talks about why he hates school and struggled there.He also rants about why he’s frustrated with the school system that his own kids are in and why he thinks a lot of it is just busy work.

Here are some frustrating things Russell talks about in this episode:

• Why Russell thinks that kids shouldn’t have homework.
• Why he is frustrated by his twin boys’ different 4th grade teachers doing things different and overloading one of them with homework.
• And why Russell thinks you should be tested on how the real world works, instead of just memorizing the right answer.

So listen below to hear why Russell is frustrated with the school system his kids are in.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. Welcome to a very, very, very rainy Marketing in Your Car. All right everybody hope you are doing amazing. I think we have a lot of new Marketing in Your Car followers and listeners. We just started promoting it. We just got set up marketinginyourcar.com. It’s got all back episodes, links to them, transcripts, and a bunch of other cool stuff. So if you want to get on the e-mail list, to get notifications when new podcasts come out, and just see a cool thing go to marketinginyourcar.com. Other than that, I’m excited to have you guys here today. Today is going to be a rant day. I hope you guys are okay. Today I wanted to rant a little bit about a thing that we like to call school. I don’t know about you guys but school for me was really, really, really difficult. I think it is for most entrepreneurs. I’m guessing that if you’re listening to this you probably fall in that same camp and you have struggled like I did, like most entrepreneurs do.

I never really understood why until recently. This guy named Alex, he wrote a book called Entrepreneur Personality Type. There’s only 500 of them in circulation. Anyway he did a talk at a Genius Network … and he’s actually speaking at our next Funnel Hacking Live. So if you’re not coming, go to funnelhacking.com and get registered for our seminar. He’s going to be speaking about the entrepreneurial personality type. When he explained it the first time I got chills like 20 times. I was like, that’s me. I finally understand myself. It made me understand why I hate school and why I struggle with it, and all sorts of stuff like that. This recently I had a reason to even hate it more. So, as you guys know, we went to London a couple weeks ago and took my family out of school for a week, and it was awesome.

Before we go we ask the teachers like, “Hey, give us some homework so we can make sure the kids don’t fall behind.” Right? So one kid basically gets no homework, one gets a couple things, and one the teachers like, “I haven’t done my plans yet so we don’t have any homework for you.” So like all right. So we go on the trip, and out there we’re like we’re in London, we’re seeing these amazing things, go into history they say the Buckingham Palace, they saw the Tower of London, they saw all these amazing things. On top of that my kids just recently read Willy Wonka, or Charlie’s Chocolate Factory or whatever it’s actually called.

So we saw the Willy Wonka play, which was amazing. Just all these cool things, right? So we come back from that. We get to school and this is just … It drives me crazy. We have twins so they’re in the same grade but different teachers, right? One teacher’s like, “Oh cool, you got tons of culture and history. You’re good. You don’t have to worry about any homework.” Then my other twin the teacher who didn’t have of her assignments done now gave him every single paper they’d done in school. Plus every homework assignment for that entire time. They were insane. We sat there for the last two weeks every single night, we spent about two to three hours with him trying to this stupid homework. He’s a fourth grader, right? Then like Sunday we spent probably eight or nine, maybe even ten hours with him just trying to get his homework done.

Like dozens, like everything that you would do in school she gave him for homework. It doesn’t make any sense they’d do that. Then the funniest thing is that they had a whole homework assignment on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We had read the book, we seen both the movies, and we just saw the play live in London within the last 30 days, right? So we’re going through trying to answer these questions and I don’t even know the answers to these things. Like it’s ridiculous. It’s like reading comprehension but it’s asking a fourth grader all these questions that have nothing to do with anything.

If I’m getting stumped on these questions at this point in my life, for fourth grade homework assignment on a play … On a book …. On a play we just barely saw, it’s just ridiculous, right? It goes on and on and on. It’s just like this mass amount of work for them to do just to keep them busy. Like I almost think it’s like parents and teachers don’t want … Like their kids are so crazy busy doing all these cool things like learning, and studying, and reading, and running, and playing, and having fun, and developing themselves as humans. They don’t like that because it’s like chaos and it’s not structured like they want it to be. So they give us all this insane amounts of homework to like structure your kids so that they’re not bugging you. It drives me crazy. They go to school at 8 in the morning, they’re home about 4. Then they had like two hours … Hour … Two hours of homework every night as well. The entire day is taken up with school work. Which none of it has any point. You know what I mean?

I remember in college writing papers and then the papers are done and then you threw them away. Like there’s no purpose and no point to any of it. It’s just all just manual, menial work that doesn’t actually help you in any way whatsoever. It just drives me crazy. So I just wanted to go on a rant today with you guys. I’m sure most of you guys can empathize with me. If I was a teacher and my kids were going to London for a week, I’d think, “Man, this is such a great experience. What I want to you do is I want you to write a report about the cool cultural things you saw, and then what you learned at the Willy Wonka play.” Something like that that’s actually is going to be so much more useful than like here’s a bunch of math problems that don’t mean anything. See if you can solve them. Oh, and then here’s a bunch of questions on that book that are so hard that don’t make … That aren’t even like logically … Things you have to go back and reread the book like 16 times to be able to find these random, obscure things you want to bring out in a quiz, and on and on and on.

I only know that because I had to reread Willy Wonka like 20 times yesterday trying to find all these little remote answers. Just ridiculous. Anway I just think that it’s crazy. I think it’s out of control. I think that our kids are stuck in a school system most the day anyway and the last thing they need is to come home and do homework. I think what they do when they get home they need to get home and get away from that, and relax, and have fun, and play, and grow and, be kids, and be creative, and stop trying to recite answers, and look up things, and figure out math problems. They do that all day at school. If they’re not doing it at school there’s an issue with the teacher I think.

There’s kind of my rant. Yeah. I’m sure some of you guys I probably deeply offended with that. For me it’s just ridiculous. It makes me … We’re not going to for a lot of reasons, I see a lot value in the homeschooling because of that. Where you can actually have your kids study things that matter and create assignment and things that help them grow as opposed to just like, “Oh, here’s a book. You read it all. Now you’ve finished reading, go back and reread to find the answers that I wanted to pull out to try to stump you.” It’s just ridiculous. It’s not how we learn in the real world, right? I think like the math … Even math … It’s funny because they spend all this time trying to teach us how to do math. Which I understand it’s good to know the basics. Since I’ve been out of college I’ve never done math once. There’s these things called calculators we use. I almost think like they should have the kids focus 50% of assignments on learning on how to use a calculator. That’s the real world we live in today, right?

I remember one of my friends is right now in college. He’s writing like a thesis statement or something like that. He’s got to write this thing. I was like well you should just hire someone to write it for you. Hire a ghost writer, you do the research, tell them what to write, and have them write it. He’s like, “No, that’s cheating.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? That’s cheating?” Guess how it works in the real world, guess what happened when I wrote my book? I did the research, 10 years of hard work, and then I found a writer to help me write it. That’s how the real world works. Okay? There’s not … I bet one out of ten books on the New York Times Best Seller List were actually written by the actual authors. There’s people that help you with that. That’s how the real world works. So why aren’t we tested on how the real world works?

It drove me crazy in one of my programming classes, I couldn’t figure out answers so I’d hire people in India and Romania to help me figure out the answers, and I’d get the problems right. My teachers would get upset saying, “You’re cheating.” I’m like, “How am I cheating?” In the real world, guess what I do when I can figure out an answer? I hire someone who gives me the answer! That’s such a more valuable skill than spending six weeks trying to figure out an answer. In fact I would fire one of my employees if they had spent six weeks trying to figure out an answer instead of just asking somebody who might actually know. That’s a skill that is transferable. That’s what school systems should be based on. Is who here can actually find the answers to questions? Not who knows all the answers to every single question. Who can memorize things and regurgitate them? Who can find these things? Who can open Google and find the answer?

That should be what tests are because the real world is. If we’re not … If the real wor- Great. I’m in the intersection and my car just died. Darn stick shifts. Sorry I’m not used to driving a stick shift while I’m ranting. It’s hard to do two things at once. That’s just how I feel so anyway. I have a lot of sympathy for my little kids who are going through this right now. Part of me just like, “Why are they even have to do this? Like they shouldn’t even worry about turning it in.” I’m trying to be a good parent and help them understand the value in it. It’s hard. So I just needed to rant to you guys who get me because I am helping my kids. I’m making sure they get homework assignments done. I’m not talking bad about their teachers. I’m trying to help them in that way.

The reality is I just don’t think that that the world works that way anymore. So for me, I’m just saying that I do not like school. If you guys agree with me, please share this podcast. If you go to marketinginyourcar.com you’ll find a link to it. You can grab and share it with your friends and family, other people who may or may not agree with me, I love to get feedback. Go comment on the blog. Let me know if you disagree. It’d be awesome to have a fun conversation there. Anyway I’m at the office. It’s rainy. So I’m going to jump out of here and go get warm. I’ll talk to you guys soon. Have an amazing day. Don’t let your kids go to school. Just kidding. They should go to school but just for the social reasons. Don’t let them stress out too much about homework. All right. I’m out of here. Talk soon.