Access challenges aside, web homework and textbook user interface is often poorly developed and difficult to access. One of my textbooks is online, but it cannot be loaded onto a phone and is constantly crashing my computer in the middle of work. This wastes my already limited time, as I must reboot and find my place again, then recover all lost files. Because such a strong Wi-Fi connection is required to access these websites, I also cannot read or do work during holidays spent away from home and must rush to finish my assignments the night before school resumes.
"The dog ate my homework" (or "My dog ate my homework") is an English expression which carries the suggestion of being a common, poorly fabricated excuse made by schoolchildren to explain their failure to turn in an assignment on time. The phrase is referenced, even beyond the educational context, as a sarcastic rejoinder to any similarly glib or otherwise insufficient or implausible explanation for a failure in any context.
Summary Of My Computer Ate My Homework
The excuse for the brevity of the document did not become the punchline for another 18 years. The first use of the phrase recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1929, in an essay in the British newspaper The Guardian: "It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework." This suggests it had been in use among students for some time prior to that.[3]
It was first reported in an American context in 1965. Bel Kaufman's bestselling comic novel, Up the Down Staircase, published that year, includes two instances where the protagonist's students blame their failure to complete their assignment on their dogs. In a section written as drama early in the book, one student refers to "a terrible tragedy ... My dog went on my homework!"[6] Later, a list of excuses includes "My dog chewed it up" and "the cat chewed it up and there was no time to do it over."[7]
The phrase became widely used in the 1970s.[8] Young adult novelist Paula Danziger paid homage to it with the title of her 1974 debut, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit.[9] Two years later Eugene Kennedy described Richard Nixon as "working on the greatest American excuse since 'the dog ate my homework'" in the Watergate tapes,[10] and the following year John R. Powers had a character in his novel The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God reminisce about having used that excuse as a student.[11] Lexicographer Barry Popik, who called it "the classic lame excuse that a student makes to a teacher to cover for missing homework", found citations in print increasing from 1976.[12]
During the next decade, personal computers became more common in American households and schools, and many students began writing papers with word processors. This provided them with another possible excuse for missing homework, in the form of computer malfunctions. Still, "the dog ate my homework" remained common. In a 1987 article on this phenomenon, one teacher recalled to The New York Times that once a student had given him a note signed by a parent saying that the dog had eaten his homework.[13] The following year President Ronald Reagan lamented Congress's apparent failure to pass that year's federal budget on time, "I had hoped that we had marked the end of the 'dog-ate-my-homework' era of Congressional budgetry", he told reporters on canceling a planned news conference to sign the bills, "but it was not to be". His use showed that the phrase had become more generalized in American discourse as referring to any insufficient or unconvincing excuse.[14]
Use of the phrase in printed matter rose steadily through the end of the century. It leveled off in the early years of the 2000s, but has not declined.[15] During the 2012 United States presidential campaign, Barack Obama's campaign used it to rebuke Mitt Romney for not participating in Nickelodeon's "Kids Pick the President" special. "'The dog ate my homework' just doesn't cut it when you're running for president."[16]
In 1989 the popular sitcom Saved By The Bell debuted. Its theme song included the line "the dog ate all my homework last night".[3] Thus embedded in the American consciousness, it would be exploited for comic purposes in other television shows and comic strips.
It became an occasional running gag on The Simpsons, which also began airing that year, mostly playing off Bart's tendency to offer ridiculous excuses for all sorts of misconduct to his teacher Mrs. Krabappel. In a 1991 episode, a difficult day for Bart begins with Santa's Little Helper, the family dog, eating his homework. "I didn't know dogs actually did that", he says, and finds his teacher equally incredulous since he had used that excuse before.[17] In a later episode, when the dog goes to work for the police, Bart must eat his own homework for the excuse to work.[18] When Mrs. Krabappel begins dating Ned Flanders, the Simpsons' neighbor, at the end of the 2011 season, she sees Santa's Little Helper in the Simpsons' yard and asks if he is the dog who has eaten Bart's homework so many times. Bart's attempts to demonstrate this and thus lend credibility to his use of the excuse backfire.[19]
Humorists have also punned on the phrase. A Sam Gross New Yorker cartoon from 1996 shows a Venetian classroom of several centuries ago where a standing student announces "The Doge ate my homework."[21]
Comic strips that feature anthropomorphized dogs as characters have found the concept of those characters eating homework a source of humor. In one of his Far Side panels, Gary Larson depicted a classroom of dogs whose teacher asks, "Did anyone here not eat his or her homework on the way to school?"[22] In a 1991 Dilbert strip, a boy on the street asks Dogbert to chew on his homework so he can have the excuse; in the last panel the boy, beaten, is shown in class claiming a dog made him eat it.[23]
There have been three different books that used the excuse as a title. Two have been collections of poetry for students with a school theme,[24][25] and one has been a business book about lessons dogs can teach about accountability.[26] Other books for young readers have had titles blaming aliens[27] and the protagonist's teacher[28] for the missing homework. A two-act children's musical called A Monster Ate My Homework has also been written.[29] The Dog Ate My Homework is the title of a British comedy/competition show first broadcast in 2014 on CBBC.[30]
Some attribute the creation of the dog ate my homework to a joke that was going around at the beginning of the 20th century. In a tale found as far back as an 1894 memoir by Anglican priest Samuel Reynolds Hole, a preacher gives a shortened version of a sermon because a dog got into his study and ate some of the pages he had written. However, the clerk loved it because they had been wanting the preacher to shorten his sermons for years.
My computer ate my homework.Yes, it's troublesome, but true.Though it didn't gnaw or nibbleand it didn't chomp or chew.It digested it completely.It consumed my homework whole,when I pressed the Shift and Enter keysinstead of Shift-Control.It devoured my hours of typing,every picture, chart and graph,and it left me most unsettledwhen I thought I heard it laugh.I would guess it was a virus,or it could have been a worm,that deleted every bitbut didn't prompt me to confirm.I suppose I might have pressed Escapeinstead of pressing Save,but, regardless, my computernow will never misbehave.For I found a good solutionand I smiled to hear the crash,when I chucked it out the windowand it landed in the trash.
With all of the fields created, we can now perform any type of reporting or analytics against these test runs. For now, we have just created a table view to report and sort on specific parameters. Now you can say it is true, Splunk ate your homework.
Time to kick back, call a few friends and get ready for Felicity, right? Not even close. Next Molly pulls out her math assignment: more than 100 fraction and long-division problems. Once she slogs through those, Molly labels all the countries and bodies of water on a map of the Middle East. And she's not through yet: she then reviews a semester's worth of science, including the ins and outs of the circulatory system. By 5:30, after doing two hours of homework, Molly sits down at the piano and practices for an hour. She'll barely have enough time to eat dinner and touch up that book report before crashing. "With less work I think we could learn what we're learning now," Molly says. "But I don't think it's too overwhelming." The strain of homework weighs more heavily on her mother. "I didn't feel [stressed] until I was in my 30s," says Libby, 43. "It hurts my feelings that my daughter feels that way at 11." Most of us remember homework, if we remember it at all, as one of the minor annoyances of growing up. Sure, we dreaded the multiplication tables and those ridiculous shoe-box dioramas. But let's admit it: we finished most of our assignments on the bus ride to school--and who even bothered with the stuff until after the requisite hours had been spent alphabetizing baseball cards, gabbing on the phone or watching reruns of Gilligan's Island? Kids today have scant time for such indulgences. Saddled with an out-of-school curriculum chock-full of Taekwondo lessons, ceramics workshops and bassoon practice, America's youngsters barely have time to check their e-mail before hunkering down with homework. On the whole, U.S. students come home with more schoolwork than ever before--and at a younger age. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, 6-to-9-year-olds in 1981 spent 44 min. a week on homework; in 1997 they did more than two hours' worth. The amount of time that 9-to-11-year-olds devoted to homework each week increased from 2 hr. 49 min. to more than 3 1/2 hr. After some historical ups and downs, homework in this country is at a high-water mark. In the early decades of the century progressive educators in many school districts banned homework in primary school in an effort to discourage rote learning. The cold war--specifically, the launch of Sputnik in 1957--put an end to that, as lawmakers scrambled to bolster math and science education in the U.S. to counter the threat of Soviet whiz kids. Students frolicked in the late 1960s and '70s, as homework declined to near World War II levels. But fears about U.S. economic competitiveness and the publication of A Nation at Risk, the 1983 government report that focused attention on the failings of American schools, ratcheted up the pressure to get tough again. Other forces have kept the trend heading upward: increasing competition to get into the best colleges and the batteries of statewide standardized tests--starting in grade school in a growing number of states--for which teachers must prepare their pupils. The homework crunch is heard loudest in the country's better middle-class school districts, where parents push their kids hard and demand that teachers deliver enough academic rigor to get students into top secondary schools and colleges. Now there's a blowback: the sheer quantity of nightly homework and the difficulty of the assignments can turn ordinary weeknights into four-hour library-research excursions, leave kids in tears and parents with migraines, and generally transform the placid refuge of home life into a tense war zone. "The atmosphere in the house gets very frustrated," says Lynne O'Callaghan, a mom in Portland, Ore., whose daughter Maeve, 8, does two hours of homework a night. "Some days it's just a struggle. Who wants it that way?" Laura Mandel, a mother of three in Warren, N.J., feels similarly embattled. "It's ironic that politicians talk so much about family values," says Mandel, "when you can't have any family time anymore because the kids are so busy keeping their nose to the grindstone." While kids grow more frazzled, parents are increasingly torn. Just how involved should they be? Should they help a son or daughter finish that geography assignment, or stay aloof and risk having a frustrated, sleep-deprived child? Should they complain to teachers about the heavy workload or be thankful that their kids are being pushed toward higher achievement? Battles over homework have become so intense that some school districts have decided to formally prescribe the amount of homework kids at each grade level should receive. All of which leaves open the questions of just how much and what kind of homework is best. Though there's evidence that homework does improve academic performance, at least in the junior high and high school years, its true value may be more subtle. It encourages good study habits and acclimates students to self-directed work--but only when it's not so oppressive that it turns them off school altogether. 2ff7e9595c
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