Are you kidding? Chinese parents furious over 12-page holiday assignment on fallen leaves
An assignment at a Hangzhou primary school prompts a furious response. ‘How would a first-grader understand the concept of a perimeter?’ one father asks
Parents at a well-known Hangzhou primary school were outraged after it asked first-grade students to write a 12-page science report on fallen leaves.
The assignment, set over the recent Golden Week holidays, asked children to collect fallen leaves from their local area “at different stages of growth” and measure their perimeter, colour, size and texture, Thepaper.cn reported on Tuesday.
“How would a first-grader understand the concept of a perimeter? This is clearly parents’ homework,” a furious father of a child at the unnamed school was quoted as saying. “The fallen leaves are all yellow; where will one go to find fresh leaves?”
The children were also asked for two hand-written reports based on their findings, totalling 12 pages. Primary education normally begins at age six in China.
The father, an engineer by profession who was not named, said that he completed the assignment and that it took him two days to do it. “I wrote 600 to 700 words for each report and I still had to make sure the text corresponded with the leaves, it was much more tiring than my usual job!”
He said his son’s only contribution was colouring in diagrams and collecting leaves.