Hey Kids, Stop Asking Me to Do Your Homework

Meghan Daum is sick of 'entitled' children who don't think for themselves
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 21, 2011 12:42 PM CDT
Hey Kids, Stop Asking Me to Do Your Homework
Kids, do this by yourselves.   (Shutterstock)

Not surprisingly, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum gets quite a few emails. But perhaps more infuriating than the ones "telling me I'm a moron and the reason print media is dying" are the ones asking her to do some kid's homework. "Not a week goes by that I don't hear from at least one high school student who's been assigned a paper about my writing and wants me to tell her what to say," she writes. "Frequently this desire is phrased without a great deal of punctuation or even the use of spell-check."

It's the "sense of entitlement" that really gets Daum: How did these kids "[miss] the memo about doing their own work"? Sure, it may be flattering that America's youth is reading her column, but it's still irksome that, in our "hyper-accessible" world, writers are expected to constantly explain what they meant in their writing. Students, she concludes, "should be figuring out the how and why of a piece of writing based not on what the author explains to them in an Internet chat room but by tapping into the pure recesses of their own minds." (More students stories.)

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