Letters for December 28, 2017

Homework fatigue

There are many problems around the world and they are very common. We all want the government to run smoothly now and to put our kids safe into their future. The problem to make this possible is education. The main factors are homework, amount of hours kids are sleeping, and standardized testing.

Being a current student athlete, homework is one of my biggest issues. Every day I have school soccer training at Wooster High School and I get home right about 7 p.m. I feel like after a long day I need to rest. According to Buildon [a nonprofit organization that runs afterschool programs], about 1.2 million students drop out of high school every year. Many end up being poor, unemployed, and violent. The top reasons they drop out of high school are because of homework and the pressure getting to them. Talking about homework, connecting to the amount of kids sleeping late most every night is because of homework and is also a pretty big problem in the school system. Teachers give a crazy amount of homework.

We do not want students to be falling asleep because they were tired last night and they didn’t get to finish because they fell asleep and they’re too tired to go to school. I want to be able tto go and able to learn something new every day.

The solutions to this problem should be the following. Up to two hours of homework is reasonable. Parents should be more involved in their children’s studies and be worried about how many hours of homework students are doing. There is a really big question we should all ask ourselves. Are teachers giving homework to occupy or are they trying to help us?

Anthony Garcia

Reno

Editor’s note: An article touching on the homework issue appeared in these pages in 2016. It can be read at https://tinyurl.com/y8edpxml.

Topical verse

A Nevada fairy tale: Humpty Heller sat on a wall. Humpty Heller will have a great fall.

Adelson’s money and Adelson’s men will never put Humpty together again.

Craig Bergland

Reno

Those Yanks

Americans that are so clever have discovered that marital infidelities can also be a good business, and that is why they have created a kind of computer marriage agency, but the opposite. I mean an agency for people who want to be unfaithful to their couples. The business must go well that it is announced on television and have created a multinational of the marital infidelity which wants to be installed in Spain and of course, advertise in television as a car or cologne.

At the beginning a national channel agreed but then it gave up and I am glad. Thank God there is still a bit of decency. I doubt very much that this type of business helps to combat the unemployment. The infidelity is as old as marriage and unfortunately it has existed, exists and will exist without the help of the Internet. Perhaps Adam and Eve also had some “affaire” when they came out of the Paradise.

Leaving to one side the times in which adulterers caught “in fraganti” were punished immediately (it still happens in certain Muslim countries), recently the adultery was considered a criminal offense and could be punished with imprisonment.

Adultery is not a pleasant situation for any of the three parties. For this reason the fact that someone can “join” to a club of unfaithful people, as if this was a football team, seems to me trivialize a matter that is already thorny. I find it hard to believe that someone is up in the morning and say: “Today I am going to be unfaithful to my wife/husband” and connect to the Internet to see what possibilities there are. According to the company, “they exist indeed.” In a day 70,000 potential candidates joined it.

All these news tell us very little of the moral condition of a society where the sex has been trivialized up to consider individuals as mere recipients of sexual instincts.

Alejandro Perez Benedicto

Teruel, Spain