I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.
In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.
Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.
How do you research HN posts? Fundamentally it comes down to a lot to knowing what source, person, or place of knowledge to trust. What are your rules of thumb to decide what to trust and not to trust?
Do you go to wikipedia and extend your research by looking in the citations, or use google right from the start?
I laughed so much at your comment, cause I used the same techniques.
To get a job, you have to have a college degree and a good GPA. To get that, you have to get good grades in college -- which means doing the homework and taking the tests. To even get into a decent college you have to have a good GPA in high school -- which, again, means doing the homework and taking the tests. Most companies don't care if you actually have the skillset, or if any of those homework assignments actually taught you anything, you need the credentials to get in the door to show it.
Grades aren't as big of a deal if you're going to be your own boss or start a business or found a startup, but in typical corporate America it's the end-all-be-all until you've got years of experience to show instead.
To live is to work and to work creatively. To live is to accomplish things. To be great is to accomplish more. If we teach kids to value doing things by the book what kind of a lesson is that?
Our virtues are built out of the stuff of our vices. Productive laziness, the kind which says "I want to accomplish such and such but there must be a way without working that hard" is a virtue.
My advice is to figure out what homework is really important and try to figure out what you want to do. Shortcuts aren't cheating. Picking which homework to do is not cheating.
If what you learn out of school is to work hard, memorize things without understanding them, and do without sleep, then it is the perfect preparation for, say, doing data entry for someone. But if you want to be great, learning how to get out of homework is a much more valuable lesson....
I particularly remember when writing long papers, I would do things like increase the character spacing, change the font size to 12.5, subtly adjust the margins, add a few words to the last sentence of a paragraph in order to push it on to the next line, etc. If I had to write a 10 page paper, I could get away with writing 8.5 pages and use these tricks to bring it up to the required length in a minute or two.
There were kids in my school who spent 3+ hours a night on homework, but certainly not me. I in no way regret getting a few Bs and Cs, coasting by with some cheating and the aforementioned tricks, and in general blowing off most of high school. I still got into a good college, in part due to SAT/PSAT scores, and I probably learned more and certainly had a better time than most of my classmates.
Interesting: I would say "I took four subjects", and you say "I gave four subjects". Never heard that before!
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.
I would rather my child got interested in some areas and pursued them out of passion, getting mediocre grades; than followed these tricks to get good grades, but not have learned much else.
First, they need to assess which teachers "Don't mind" if you don't do the homework. This could mean they stand you up in front of the whole class and shout at you, but if they don't give you an after school detention, don't do it. Getting in the teachers good books previously helps with this.
Second, if you've got a joke subject before one with homework due, do the homework then. Geography before Maths for example.
Third, have a homework team where you take it in turns to do the easily copied homework (Maths, DT, Science) and then copy each other in the mornings before school. Of course you need to cover your tracks.
Fourth, always cut corners. No calculator? Lol, use a calculator, but purposely get a few wrong. Use Google for everything (I didn't have a computer until yr8). Never read a book when you can read a synopsis/ watch the film whilst playing Pokémon.
Fifth, work as a team at home. The parent will have to remember things from their childhood, where as older siblings only need to remember from the year before. I used to do my middle brother's compulsory homework, whilst he did my littlest brother's, and my mum did mine.
Other tricks: Try leaving all of you books related to that subject at home one day and claim you thought it was Thursday.
Miss out a question at the bottom of a page, they might not even notice.
Pretend you are/were ill.
Cry
Hand in last weeks homework again. This one only buys you time, but works well on a Friday.
Tell your teacher you'll hand it in tomorrow, then the next day tell them you handed it in yesterday and they've lost it.
Band together with the other kids in your class and tell the teacher they said the homework was due for next week, or that they didn't even set it.
If you are asked to hand something in on lined paper, just don't do a whole sheets worth. More convincing if both sheets start/end in the middle of a sentence. I've done this before and they didn't even comment, I suspect they felt guilty they'd lost it.
Note: I successfully used all these tricks on several occasions. I would say that it definitely had no impact on my education (Got a AAAB at A level, 1st Class degree in Electronic Engineering w/ Hons), and a very significant positive impact on my life as a whole.