I have been saying this since the seventh grade. Thank goodness I'm not the only person out there who thinks like this.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/homework.htm?2

That's a great read. You should click the link, especially if you or someone you know is in education. I like to work hard and I know how good the satisfaction of a "job well done" can feel, but getting me to do homework has always been like trying to herd cats. This is mostly out of an unwillingness to spend extra time on a task I feel I already sufficiently mastered during lecture. For some reason the consequence of not doing homework (lower grades) was never enough of an incentive to make me do my homework, because I have always felt grades were an inadequate indicator of one's mastery of a subject.

If I could have it my way, every class would end with an oral final where you are called in to talk to your professor for one hour about any of the subjects he has covered in lecture. If you can show that you are conversant in the topic, you pass. If you cannot, you fail. You could argue that this takes time the professor doesn't have, but how many hours do you think history teachers spend on each of their students' essays? Wouldn't a conversation be roughly the same amount of time and ultimately be an easier, lower-stress way to gauge the students' understanding? If this system were in place, I'd have graduated a semester early with a perfect grade point.

Of course, this system would also eliminate the whole ABCDF grading scale. Why? Because as I said before, it is a ridiculous indicator for how well one understands a topic. It is often more indicative of a student's willingness to do busywork than their ability to converse and postulate on the topic (or in the case of math and music, execute the given task), and if said ability is not the point of these classes, then to what purpose are they meant to further my education?

I love to learn, but I hate education. Very little (if any) of my mental progress in the past ten years of my life has had anything to do with academia. I say this not to brag, because I think it's pathetic, but more because I fear for when I have kids and they are forced to do these menial tasks. When they ask me if they have to do it, and I say yes, because they have to get good grades so that they can get into college and then get good grades in college so that someone will hire them when they graduate, I will say it and I know I will believe it, and I'm already mad at myself for it. The problem here? There is no way in the universe the accepted method of teaching schoolchildren will change so dramatically any time in the next twenty years. Even though the system is obviously broken, I will be forced to submit my children to it even though I have nothing but disdain for nearly all of the most basic tenets of education. Because otherwise, they fail at life. And that is retarded.

Stream of consciousness paragraph:
Occam's razor: "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Or, as it is more commonly stated, "The simplest solution is almost always best." Simplify. Less paper. Less stress for the kids. How do we teach without pounding information into a child's head? We appeal to them, and make it interesting. We do not turn them off and bore them or tire them of the subject. In math, we give them a problem, give them tools to solve it. We challenge them to find out why this works. In history, we tell them a story. Give them a narrative! History is full of fascinating narratives that are being ruined by poor storytellers posing as educators. Quiz them, certainly, but in a way that makes them think, not memorize. Ask them what can be learned from ego of... well, any French ruler, really. Ask them what might have happened if one war or another had gone the other way. And don't just feed them an answer, make them give you something that they thought up on their own.

I'm losing focus here. Time to stop.