
So what the hell is the point of homework? All the time I was in an institution that required it, I never did it.

Then I would wait for someone to say "let's get a beer!" Usually that was me because I was kind of alone in that sentiment. I would sit in a study group, flipping pages of problems and reading them and going "yeah I could do that if I needed to". I did pass those classes, and in some cases I wound up with good grades. I honestly prayed to pass some of my more brutal math exams. Final exams in college were a time for me to find religion. Somewhere along the way I learned the importance of homework.

Slightly-older-John differs from in-high-school-John with regards to homework. I use homework in hiring as a signal detector. This is one place where homework has value. The visible flush of emotions that washed through my body would probably have won an award for TV drama. I wish I could have seen my face when I was first told that statement. "We like the quality of people you hire and we do not like the way you hire them". Sometimes, mere minutes later, I have had those tools and techniques weaponized against me to get me to stop doing things so gosh darned differently than the way things used to get done. I have given presentations on hiring practices and techniques and tools I use to companies. Sometimes they realize I have TRON-like powers and I fight for the user, but in some cases, I upset the apple cart of their status quo and bring my horrible notions of change. I am an angel of death to most human resource departments. Mostly, it accomplishes the opposite result, and gets people to just hate doing their homework. This is a Hail Mary pass by the education system to get you to realize it is a life skill that is probably in some overpriced self-help book about how to be an amazing super rich successful person who adults Real Good.

I kinda missed the point he was trying to make. Unfortunately, I was cocky about it and always learned the material in real-time while I was writing out the solution on the board. In one of my classes, we put our homework problems on the board every lesson and I was always in the "volunteer" pool picked by the teacher to show my work. I was going to Waterloo to study Mathematics and they were doing their damned best to get me to develop habits that I would need to be successful. I have to give credit to my math teachers in high school (and my science teachers but for other reasons). Quite frankly I often did not do it unless it really interested me.
