The one thing I’ve learned as a parent is that homework never really goes away.   I am haunted by the ghosts of algebra past, 20 years removed from when I last took a class on how to solve a quadratic equation.  I look at a y= equation and think of how I can convert it so it will work in Excel.

I graduated high school in 1989, just a mere ten years after the invention of the Internet, and still 3 years from it bursting out of the backrooms and basements of nerds on home-built computers.  Even when the Internet hit it big and I was exposed to it first in 1995, it was little more than a collection of simple pages with some links.  Amazon was an online bookstore that everyone predicted would fail against competition from a brick-and-mortar store, because at a “real” store one could browse the books and read a little before buying.

And now, in the modern age of the Internet, I can find videos on YouTube on how to do quadratic equations.  I can find detailed and interactive examples on how to graph the slope of the line, or connect to NASA to find recent pictures from Hubble of Sagitarius and Alpha Centauri.  Authors have web sites, and email addresses that students can contact to ask for additional insight into their work.  Wikipedia revolutionized the encyclopedia by bringing the responsibility for the content to the people, and good or bad, it is all there.

I’ve also discovered the downside to homework and the Internet.  Mostly, these days, it provides a lot of distraction to those with short attention spans.  There has been a lot of studies on workplace efficiency losses due to funny videos, Hulu access, MySpace/Facebook, and everything else that leads to time-leak.  Recently I watched a dear, sweet child, full of studious intent, log in the computer and they spent 5 minutes opening their email, another 5 minutes checking their Facebook status, 10 minutes to select just the right music mix, and 20 minutes have just gone by.

So now the question is: Do I restrict how they access the net?  Or do I reinforce that the time wasted is time they cannot recover?

I certainly don’t have all the answers to this, but it really does come down to trusting the child.  No two children are the same, and I am learning that what works for one isn’t the best for another.  We have one child that is doing well with their school, and therefore has earned a degree of trust in that unlimited access to the Internet isn’t a distraction for them.  Another child, one not doing as well as they are capable of, finds the online distraction a little too much and has since seen the access become more restricted with each passing day.

What a distance we have come since the days I was a high school student!  The biggest distraction I had growing up was a television with barely more than 10 channels and my friends calling me up wanting me to hang out.  It is so much different, and it is so much harder now.  The amount of raw data and naked information that we have available now is requiring us to evolve as a society.  Our social norms and rules of etiquette are far different with twitter, email, and video-chat, than what we have ever faced before.  Just like how rock & roll redefined society from the teenager’s perspective, a lot of what is driving the innovation and adoption of this new social medium is from the eyes of the young.

So my question is how do we sensibly help guide the direction of this hurricane along its path?  We are dealing more with a force of nature and chaos than with a simple change to the status quo.

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