North Texas Daily

Nod: No more homework confirmed, books and dirty looks also rumored

Flash back to around fifth grade and you’ll remember how fundamentally unfair homework assignments probably felt. Piling on more work after forcing kids to spend all day at school is just plain cruel – and one country across the Atlantic agrees. Last week, French president Francois Hollande announced that his new plan for education reform would declare homework illegal. Don’t panic, but your inner child just hopped on a plane.

Besides securing future votes from eight-year-olds everywhere, the president actually has a fairly solid argument. He believes that students with educated parents will receive more assistance on home assignments, while underprivileged kids’ parents will either be too busy or lack the education themselves to help out. By keeping all schoolwork in school, Hollande hopes to prevent any unfair advantage.

We may be too old to benefit from such a drastic change, but if you’d like to protect your children from the atrocities of homework, you might consider a move to France. The edboard would like to deliver a nod – or a “hochement de tête” – to President Hollande, but he’s all the way across the ocean and we can’t afford plane tickets.

Shake: The not-so-mean Green

While most of us were caught up in the simultaneous chaos of the Mean Green football game and the second presidential debate on Tuesday night, a different kind of drama was unfolding under our very noses.

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney made their final preparations a few hours before the debate began at Hofstra University’s auditorium, third-party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested outside for trying to force their way into the building and participate in the debate.

The Green Party, the group endorsing Stein for president, will appear as an option on 83 percent of the nation’s ballots. This makes a Green Party win in 2012 technically possible – but the debate organizers clearly aren’t holding their breath.

Someday in the far future, third parties might transform into a viable threat to the current American two-party system. But right now, it looks like Stein isn’t doing the Green Party any favors when it comes to being taken seriously.

We have no choice but to deliver a shake to Stein, Honkala, the arresting officers and the entire American electoral system. Somebody has to be right, but this whole situation is such a mess that we’re afraid to take sides.