I have always been an advocate of the belief that both people and children have not changed one bit during the last few Millennium. (No, they’re not the same thing at all.) I believe that cave children had just as many excuses for not putting away their rocks and bones as children today have for leaving their game controllers and iPods lying all over the living room floor (“That’s not my rock/game. No, I don’t know who it belongs to. Wait! Don’t throw it away! It might belong to someone and they probably want it back; why don’t you just give it to me?”)
I also believe that children have confounded their parents with their choices in clothes, hair, and music since the dawn of time. (Remember, the waltz was once considered scandalous.) And I believe that each successive generation conveniently forgets all of this when the time comes for them to have kids of their own, thereby guaranteeing a long, non-broken lineage of the familiar lament, “I don’t know what the problem is with kids these days.” Still, even believing all of that, I must admit that there has been a habit I have noticed lately among children—my own and others—that I can honestly say strikes me as an entirely new phenomenon, something that, as far as I can tell, is strictly limited to the generation currently wearing the “kids these days” crown. This habit to which I am referring is the one where they refuse to turn their homework assignments in.
I’m not talking about not doing their assignments. Oh, there’s plenty of that going around, too, but that’s nothing new. And I’m not talking about saying they did an assignment when they really didn’t. (The old “dog/sabertooth tiger ate my homework” dodge has been around forever.) No, what I’m talking about is when they take the time, either through their own initiative or our incessant nagging, to actually DO an assignment, and then fail to turn it in.
And not because they forgot it on their desk (or on the bus, in the car, under the porch, up in the treehouse, etc.), but because they just don’t ever hand it in. It might be in their backpacks, at their very fingertips, when the teacher asks for assignments, and yet there it remains, for weeks and weeks, until finally they decide it has reached some kind of secret “expiration date” (“It’s too late to turn this in now”) and they throw it away.
I have conducted an informal poll among all of the parents I know, and no matter what kind of a kid they were themselves (control freak, space cadet, uber-nerd, stoner, sullen outcast) they all agree that this was something they never, ever, did. And they all lament the fact that they each have at least one child at home who does this very thing. It is maddening. And confounding.
Why do they do it? (Or rather, why do they not do it?) Could it be because they were born into a world with Wikipedia and Twitter, and are already presupposing a Brave New World where actually physically turning in assignments will be archaic: instead the homework will instantly be beamed from the student’s mind into the teacher’s head? Are they already anticipating the time when they will roll their eyes at us for ever needing to print out and hand in assignments, the same way they now roll their eyes at us when we insist on carrying an actual paper map in the glovebox?
Maybe, unlike us, they can already imagine a time when absolutely everything is stored in “the cloud.” Or maybe, just like a thousand generations before them, they are simply coming up with newer and better ways to annoy us. Yeah: that sounds a lot more likely to me, too.