I must be the dinosaur around here because I remember what Catholic schools and home life was like in the late 1940s-early 1950s. I come down on the side of homework.
There was always homework, lots of it, even in 1st Grade. I know my multiplication tables by heart because of all the homework. There was NO acceptable excuse for not doing it or turning it in late, save death. Preferably your own.
Eating dinner as a family was a rare treat, since my dad worked in restaurants and hotels. There was no TV or cell phones. We played outside, in the streets.
We survived.
Much of the time spent teaching in high school was, what I found to be amusing, hearing their anti work arguments and sometimes deflecting the arguments and observing their reaction. Seventh grade boys would offer me cash “if I were interested in money, I’d have a different career.” Or they’d say, “I don’t need to know how to spell, I’m gonna have a secretary.”
The ninth graders very busy with wanting to use electronics in class (my kids were not allowed a calculator until high school at least). They’d say “oh you don’t know THAT? You need to get up to speed on this.”
I’d say I knew guys (my father) who invented personal computers and did so by whatever they were teaching them in NY suburban Catholic high school in the late forties early fifties and in engineering school at the military academy and they learned this Shakespeare stuff so back to work.
i also told them that classic stories were good not because they were old but because they were good. And that it was they who were going to need to get good culture going again
You are fortunate to have been from a different culture—and not having TV or cell phones is certainly a large part of it.
I imagine because of the tendency to automatically pass people, half of the second gradesrs this teacher is dealing with still can’t really read. Probably not a problem that your second grade teacher had to deal with.