Hey Kids, Stop Asking Me to Do Your Homework

Not surprisingly, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum gets quite a few emails. But perhaps more infuriating than the ones "telling me I'm a moron and the reason print media is dying" are the ones asking her to do some kid's homework. "Not a week goes by that I don't hear from at least one high school student who's been assigned a paper about my writing and wants me to tell her what to say," she writes. "Frequently this desire is phrased without a great deal of punctuation or even the use of spell-check."

It's the "sense of entitlement" that really gets Daum: How did these kids "[miss] the memo about doing their own work"? Sure, it may be flattering that America's youth is reading her column, but it's still irksome that, in our "hyper-accessible" world, writers are expected to constantly explain what they meant in their writing. Students, she concludes, "should be figuring out the how and why of a piece of writing based not on what the author explains to them in an Internet chat room but by tapping into the pure recesses of their own minds."