Homework Aversion - Some Students Need Serious Therapy!

Why do so many students hate doing homework? Look it’s the age of the Internet. We might even be tempted to call this the age of the Internet, redux. Distractions are plentiful and easy to find. Nowadays these distractions are more and more often your own friends. There is Facebook, there is Snapchat, there are legions of others. Each app is a world unto its own, and within each app there is a friend or potential friend beckoning for our attention. As the old saying goes, “With friends like these...” who needs homework?

This is not to say that homework was any easier to accomplish back in the day: it was not. Or at least I doubt that it was, though I could ask my grandfather to be sure. It is just that it is so much harder to be bored when you are so instantly connected to every possible thing and every possible person. What I am suggesting is that it is harder now, more than ever, to be bored. Many great things were accomplished in the past when boredom still existed: mathematics, science, all that great stuff. But what, dear reader, I beg you are the chances that these things would ever have been invented today. Who among us is ready to say that Gregor Mendel, were he to be alive this year, would be so bored that he would produce his famed work on genetics in the current day?

I am making a comparison between a famed scientist of yore and the modern, lazy student who refuses to do her homework and/or seeks help from established homework tutors and editors. I just need the reader to follow and use their imagination for a moment here. The idea is that, without the Internet, without iPhones or Android, yes, the lazy students of the world would all be Gregor Mendels. Well, maybe I would not go that far. Let us say, instead, that they would be every so slightly more likely to become scientists on the order of Gregor Mendel without all the modern technological wizardry that Silicon Valley has blessed the world.

I do not want to make it seem as though I exclude myself from the pack of lazy modern students. Although I have done loads of homework and even completed a few studies of which I am proud I confess that I, too, am stricken with this modern disease. Laziness has probably played its part in the fact that I was not able to achieve a 4.0 grade point average. Laziness probably also accounts for the fact that my Management survey did not score first in my class of peers. I confess that I want to earn praise and distinction and fame. But, my goodness, look at that! My chum just posted a fascinating article about Kim K on the ‘ole Facebook, which I like to refer to as “Big Blue.”

The takeaway, dearest reader, is that there is no avoiding the siren call of Internet and smartphone these days. One can only hope to tie oneself to the mast and, even then, hope that the bindings are strong enough for the next 45 minutes of quiet study away from the sweet, sweet call of that latest Snapchat that surely just landed in my inbox. At any rate, who needs homework? Who even needs science anymore? Mendel was a great man and he is our man. But, look, dearest reader! Gregor Mendel was bored, and he did his work so that we would not have to. The technology has merged with our genotype but nobody noticed because that was the moment Katy Perry posted her latest brand partnership in a tidy 140 characters or less.