busywork i'm sure that b's teacher is wonderful. he's just not the right student for her. b reads history books for fun. b reads biographies and auto-biographies of people who found themselves center of the world stage. like for example, the pilot of the surveillance plane that collided with the chinese fighter plane. she assigns a ton of homework. so now he does less of that kind of reading. one would think there isn't a problem. cause history is his favorite subject. except she assigns what b termed coloring projects. hours of coloring. his class is falling behind the other classes. the solution of course, is to assign more busywork. he got a c on one of his tests. he answered all the questions correctly. but he didn't color the pictures. i told b, he needs to make decisions about the best use of his time. the last time he stayed up all night doing busywork he came down with pneumonia and missed a week of school. i suggested he get the teacher a coloring book for christmas. tell her she has to have all the pictures colored by the first day of school after break. heh. i told him to set a timer. her work gets 15 minutes. which is how long the homework takes for each of his other classes. and whatever he gets done is what he turns in. yeah, his grades will suffer. but no one looks at middle school grades. i suggested he turn in a list of what he did instead of his assignment. for examples, i worked on an eagle scout project, went skiing, read a book about european history, went to a play, talked with my parents about macro-economics, worked on my non-profit web site, read ahead two chapters.  ¶ 8:00 AM