Website Does Homework For Kids

A new French website allows children to pay older students to do their homework for them. Faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) allows children to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes costs 80 euros ($100). Founder Stephane Boukris says, "I realized there was a gap in the market. Add to that a dose of insolence, a zest of arrogance and the internet, and you have faismesdevoirs.com." I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.

Comments

If you teach them that an arbitrary system...

[Shadow of Eternity]

... is all that matters and not the actual comprehension, then they will find a way around the arbitrary system.

In other words, if you ask for bullshit do not be surprised when they bullshit you.

Re:If you teach them that an arbitrary system...

[Anonymous Coward]

"... is all that matters and not the actual comprehension, then they will find a way around the arbitrary system."

The real problem comes from measuring "comprehension". Schools are not run based on scientific principles, they don't take into account the students interest or student feedback, many kids grow up to hate the institutions of school because of this.

Re:If you teach them that an arbitrary system...

[nine-times]

To some extent, the problem is that schools are designed to churn out factory workers. They teach people to do as they're told, follow directions, and performance at completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. It's no coincidence that our current school systems have their roots in the industrial revolution.

So the US is now a country of people who have a factory-worker mentality and generally approach problems the way a factory worker would, but we aren't factory workers. The factories have gone, manufacturing is all done overseas, but we still think that performance in completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. As a result, we even think of schools as little worker-factories, and we set them up to churn out more factory workers.

I wish I knew how to change that.

Re:If you teach them that an arbitrary system...

[Shadow of Eternity]

Stop pretending that everyone is "gifted" or "honors" and let the precious snowflakes that get it after the third go move on in advanced classes while the ones that actually need to bang their head against 50 problems stay behind.

In other words don't punish excellence with forced mediocrity. Throw in some ethics as a preventative measure and if they get cocky and act too superior anyway they'll get taken down a notch when they hit something they can't do.

Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[gcnaddict]

"It turns them into consumers. The message is that for the right price you can get the results you want. It's nonsense," [Agathe Field] said.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[Arancaytar]

Yeah, sounds like a perfect preparation for the real world.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[geekymachoman]

Yeah, sounds like a perfect preparation for the real world.

As a gown up who as a kid was cheating in school:

Then change the teaching methods. Kids don't want to learn because they find that certain subject boring, or the way it's teached is boring. so they cheat. My teachers and system, weren't interested in all that. It's easier to give an F, so I was forced to cheat.

The current system, it appears to me, is designed for punishing. You didn't learn ? Ok, here's F and you think about this. System of reward and punishment. But that doesn't work very well, so when we talk about kids who cheat or get a F, be aware of that, before condeming and limiting them in "real world" when they grow up. Grown up's messed up, kids where innocent, naive and afraid victims.

As Winston Churchill says - Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[cephalien]

"I was bored, and my teachers weren't interested in doing things my way, so instead of making a good faith attempt to learn, I cheated."

Wow. No wonder all my students think they're entitled to passing grades just because they show up.

Man up, Nancy. Until the school systems are so well funded that we have a 1:1 teacher student ratio, some kids are just going to have to suck it up and learn the hard way.

Cheating is just an excuse to not work hard. If you can demonstrate serious effort and still have trouble, try finding a teacher/professor during office hours.

Amazingly, we're pretty ameniable to trying to explain topics over again if you'd bother to ask.

Cheat in my lectures, and you get a zero. The end.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Sleep 4 to 5 hours, skip breakfast, carry 2/3rds of your weight half a mile, listen to a lecture and then write by hand a 5 paragraph essay, carry that weight another half mile, repeat, carry that weight another half mile, repeat, carry it another half mile, this time to 50 advanced chemistry problems without ANY type of calculator OR slide rule OR lookup table for square roots, go another half mile to stand in line for 25 minutes of your half hour lunch break and pay $3 eat 1 ~4 inch long slice of pizza and about 8 ounces of skim milk that's past it's expiration date, pick it up and haul it another half mile to do 50 3-equation sets of quadratics with a 4 function calculator, go another half mile and then another 5 paragraph essay gets churned out.

Now go home and read roughly 2 small paperback novels, do two more 5 paragraph essays, another 80 quadratic sets, another 22 chem problems, and work on whatever random assignment the teacher wants you to do as part of a "yearlong research project".

Oh yeah you're doing all of this in a school that's designed for a population so much lower that right now you've got 3 toilets for about 1200 people. And it's 85 degrees outside and 80% humidity and much hotter during your your half-hour long bus ride that is literally 4 to a seat and people standing in the aisles, and you get to do this all again tomorrow.

In the 3 minutes you have from the moment your teacher allows you to begin taking things off your desk and putting them in your backpack you try to go to the bathroom but teachers keep walking to the front of the 20 student line and screwing you over.

They obviously don't give three shits about anything other than themselves and whether you cheat or not you'll still be far and away qualified for college and the real world.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[nine-times]

I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care.

There's a very fine line between "bored" and "lazy and didn't care". If I'm not doing something because the activity bores me, then clearly I don't want to work on it because I don't care much about it.

I have an aversion to the word "lazy" because I'm not sure what it's trying describe. It seems to me to imply that there are people who won't do work because they simply won't, as though there are no further reasons behind it. That doesn't accurately describe anyone I know.

Most of the time that I've dealt with people who are averse to work, there are really a number of factors at play. For one thing, if I refuse to do the work you want me to, it's possible that I just don't think that work is valuable, and it's even possible that I'm right about that. It may also be that I don't really know how to do that work, or I don't know where to begin, and rather than admitting it, I just put it off.

Beyond that, lots of people that I know who are "lazy" in general are also just very discouraged from working. Often they're coming from a place where they believe that nothing they do will be accepted by others to be "good enough". If you're feeling like you have no possibility of success and achievement, then there doesn't seem to be much point in trying.

I know I probably sound like a politically correct hippy who's just making excuses, but I just think there's something dangerous in labeling children as "lazy". It's saying, "You're not just disinterested or discouraged, but there's actually a serious flaw with you, personally, that makes you unworthy of success." If being discouraged is actually part of the problem, then calling them "lazy" may be very counter-productive in getting them to work on things.

Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much?

[TrekkieGod]

Cheating is just an excuse to not work hard. If you can demonstrate serious effort and still have trouble, try finding a teacher/professor during office hours.

Although I agree with you that cheating is unacceptable (and deserving of a zero), it is a symptom of the system. You say it's an excuse to not work hard, and you want serious effort being demonstrated. Well, working hard and amount of effort should be completely irrelevant. Results are what matter. That's true in the "real world" and it should be true in the schools.

Some people will learn effortlessly. Others will require more work. Yet, some teachers (not necessarily you) insist on giving large amounts of busy work, just to make sure that the students have hours of work after school to accomplish, on the hopes that the ones who are having difficulty learning will eventually do so by repetition.

Problem #1: Even the ones who do eventually learn through the busy-work repetition are not actually "learning." They'll be able to follow the example to solve that types of problems given them, but they'll have no idea how to apply the concepts to solve problems they haven't seen before.

Problem #2: The ones who learn quickly end up wasting their time on tons of problems they already know how to work.

Problem #3: There are people on both categories who will simply be frustrated with the amount of work, and just not do it. They'll either take the bad grade or cheat. Not saying that's a justification to the cheating, here. Personally, I just used to calculate exactly how much homework I could get away with not doing to get the grade I wanted in the class rather than cheat. I'm not a genius either, but homework really was given in extremely large amounts to compensate for the people who were really having trouble with the classes.

Ideally, this is what you do: you assign homework, but don't grade it. Assign lots of problems but let your students decide how much they need to work on. You can have them turn it in and correct the problems they did work on (without assigning a grade, so they don't have to turn in everything...this will keep your workload lighter too) so that they get confirmation that what they think they are doing correctly actually is correct.

You keep your classes discussion oriented. Make sure students are involved when you ask them about the concepts, not the problems.

You give them tests for the evaluation of their knowledge, which is the only thing that should matter. Part of the test is like the problems they've worked on for homework, but at least half the test are problems they've never seen before, but have the knowledge to figure out. This ensures you are testing their knowledge, not their ability to memorize a process to solve a particular type of problem.

There. Now if somebody fails the test because they didn't do any of the optional homework, it's their own damn fault for not wishing to work hard. However, you're no longer trying to punish people who don't wish to work harder then they have to.

Re:Exam day

[MozeeToby]

For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way. If you think about it, homework is what prepares your day to day job (though sometimes extreme deadlines begin to feel more like tests). I've been out of college for 2 years now and I've spent 99% of my work time doing what I would call homework, and about 1% doing what I would call tests.

Not that being able to think on your feet isn't important, sometimes it is the 1% that matters after all.

Re:Development Based 'Montessori' education

[PPH]

It uses knowledge to build the connections in the brain, rather than having the focus be on rote memorization of the knowledge itself.

The only 'connections' that Faismesdevoirs develops are the kinds involving how to use your money and influence to get other people to do your job. This isn't an educational method (like Montessori is). It teaches people how to weasel out of doing actual work.

Re:Actually that's good for society!

[psnyder]

I wish I had mod points to mark this funny.

In all seriousness though, the goal should be to bring up the lower class to the higher level, not to lower the upper class to the lower level. They're not the same thing. While the overall value of money stays the same in economics, the actual, real-world worth is what we should focus on.

Think of the Jetsons, complaining that they're poor and can only afford that huge house and the older type robot housekeeper. Lowering the productivity of the upper class is not the same as raising the productivity of the lower class.

You are somewhat right, but miss a vital bit

[SmallFurryCreature]

Lazy is a judgement by a certain standard.

Lets use another judgement, sweet, to illustrate. What is sweet (as in sugar is sweet)?

Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet. Worse, depending on what I been eating before, my mental and physical state, I may experience sweetness in a different way. So wether something is sweet or not is not an absolute. Yes as a society we must be able to label things as either sweet or not sweet based on general consent that doesn't exist. Sugar is sweet even for people who lack any capability of sensing sweetness.

Lazy, in the case of people being to lazy to be intrested works in a similar way. Sure, in lab you might be able to make any task intresting enough to engage a person who is really just bored or any of the other things you mention rather then "lazy". But the world is not a lab and schools/employers can not spend endless resources trying to make every bored person intrested. Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.

If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy. The problem with that is that you end up chasing a rainbow. There will always be a kid who is even futher behind. Even more disintrested even more bored. Chase that kid and all the others, who were intrested will instead be left behind. School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.

Worse, you can do this in school but trust me, that is not going to happen in real life. I see this regularly, "kids" who just never learned that in the workplace school rules do not apply. No, your employer doesn't own you a job, the board of directors is not going to fix your performance review to increase their grade point average etc etc. Most of the time, you won't even get in as nobody is going to hire somebody they got to motivate even to turn up for a job interview.

Your ideas are alright, just not practical. At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy. Sure, you might re-label them "too expensive to be motivated" instead if that makes you happy, but the result is the same. If you can't motivate yourself to a certain point, nobody is going to do it for you in the real world.

Re:You are somewhat right, but miss a vital bit

[nine-times]

Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.

I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.

Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.

This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".

I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.

If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.

Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.

School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.

I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.

At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.

At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?

Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.

But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:

• understood the importance of a task
• believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task
• knew which task needed to be complete and how to do it
• felt confident in his/her own ability to complete that task

I