When I was 17 and attending high school, our German teacher was going to be absent for a week. To keep us busy, he assigned a rather large amount of homework for us to do during the week. Instead of even taking a look at it, most of us went ahead and did what 17 year olds do: we played games, flirted clumsily, got very depressed and hours later danced with joy, gossiped, secretly fell in love with someone and never got the courage to say anything to them, fought meaningless fights over song lyrics, tried to look cool (some of us even succeeded), and all the other, standard high school stuff. When the teacher returned and found us with stupid looks and wide grins instead of finished homework, he was a bit pissed off. He gave us two more days to complete it all, including some extra work he added. Each of us also had to write an essay on why it was wrong to ignore the homework and why such assignments are important for us.
This here was my essay.
(Translated to English. For the German original, click here.)
On the Sanctity of Homework
A truly important part of our lives as students, homework is certainly interesting, since it is a powerful entity that elevates a student to ecstatic states of happiness. Nevertheless, it is very delicate and extremely difficult to comprehend. The first thoughts towards an understanding of homework originated during the golden age of ancient Greece, but the history of homework assignments begins at a much earlier time.
The culture of homework starts with the dawn of mankind. However, its development was limited until the invention of writing. This discovery, which led mankind to an advanced and civilized future—even with digital watches—greatly accelerated the progress of homework assignments as well. Some of these primitive Homo erectus thought with their smaller brains that they could assign work to their children, which the children would do at home and produce written results. This brilliant idea was immediately accepted and used for a long time as a brand new method of torturing children. In time, the new and exciting trend slowly became a habit. Every day, children wrote two or three pages without a reason. Millennia passed like this.
The first people to engage the philosophical side of homework were the ancient Greeks. They posed questions about the nature of homework, such as "What is homework?" or "Why homework?" or "Where does homework come from and where does it go? How did it come to be? Did it exist forever, or did some force create it?"
In 450 BC, a deterministic point of view towards homework emerged. A group of philosophers established homework's reason for existence. It exists as a means by which adults can punish children for being too many, too little, hyperactive, and too loud. Once its true purpose was discovered, no obstacles remained to hinder a rapid development of homework.
With advances in technology, particularly with the development of nuclear energy after the Second World War, homework has taken great leaps forward and reached its current state. In this era, homework is a state-of-the-art secret weapon of the military. This psychologically and technically refined modern version is used to arm German teachers. Here it might be a good idea to focus a little closer on these teachers, since they are essential in the utilization of homework.
German teachers are unique products of nature. They emerged through the phenomenon of natural selection: The strong eat the weak and survive ["On the Origin of Species", Charles Darwin, 1859]. They were lethal and hungry enough to easily survive. No species could oppose the German teacher and its highly dangerous natural weapons: strong teeth, sharp claws, and deductive logic. A German teacher can rip its prey into pieces within five minutes or bore it to death within one minute. Both are extremely painful. The military recognized the potential of German teachers early on, extracted them from their natural habitat of wild jungles and formed special troops. Today, German teachers armed with the latest, longest and most difficult homework assignments are used in the assimilation of high school students—an unruly and therefore unwanted human race.
I am a high school student myself, and I have a German teacher as well: Mr. K. He is a very good German teacher, one of the best. He had given us a homework assignment due in one week. Although I believe that doing homework elevates the soul, I must admit that I did not touch the assignment during that week. But before analyzing my behavior, I would like to elaborate on this important point. Homework really is a sacred thing. It is a bridge between God and mankind. It has a mystical significance. When doing homework, one concentrates on the entire universe and realizes how tiny and insignificant one is. At that instant, this tiny mind becomes one with the infinite universe and God, and in this storm of being the soul reaches the highest possible level. A massive flow of wonderful feelings takes place while doing homework. Despite all this, I did not do my homework. The reason for my inexplicable behavior is unclear even to myself. What's clear is that I feel remorse, since now I am assigned additional work on top of it as punishment. Luckily, homework is divine, and I love doing it. I also recommend everybody else do all the homework you can get your hands on. Finally, with an apology to Mr. K, I end my short but monumentally meaningful essay...
