20 Ancient Homework Assignments That Would Make Students Today Groan

Around 1260, a 7-year-old boy named Onfim was learning to read and write in Novgorod, Russia. Like any student practicing his lessons, he wrote letters, spelling lists, and verses from the Psalms, except his writing materials were sheets of birch bark and an iron stylus. Seventeen pieces of his schoolwork have survived to this day, thanks to Novgorod’s wet, low-oxygen clay soil, which kept the bark from decaying. But Onfim wasn’t always focused on his lessons. He also liked to doodle, drawing himself as a knight on horseback stabbing an enemy with a lance. In another sketch, he drew a monster and labeled it “I am a wild beast.”

In Nippur, Iraq, students at a scribal school learned their trade by pressing cuneiform signs and Sumerian-Akkadian word lists into wet clay. On a small round tablet, dating from between 1800 and 1750 BCE, a student has bitten right into the soft clay before it could dry. It has since baked hard, but left a clear impression of his teeth, a mere physical sign of his boredom or frustration, though we don’t know what he was thinking about.

In 1857, the French author Prosper Mérimée composed a fiendishly difficult dictation text for a parlor game played by the court of Emperor Napoleon III at Compiègne. As the main method of assessing literacy, dictation was used in French schools, where an excerpt was read aloud for children to copy verbatim. With its silent letters, homophones, and grammatical snags, Mérimée’s 179-word text had Napoleon III, a grown man who had received a formal education, make dozens of errors while attempting to get it right.

Vindolanda was a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in modern-day northern England. It was about as far from Rome as you could possibly be. Sometime between 97 and 105 CE, someone stationed there, perhaps a young clerk working on his penmanship, wrote a line from Virgil’s The Aeneid, the founding myth of Rome, on a wooden writing tablet. “Meanwhile Rumor, the winged messenger, flies through the terrified city,” he wrote.

The Calmecac were boarding schools for noblemen located in the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). The priests of these schools taught the boys to be judges, generals, and priests, and they committed sacred hymns, calendars, and codex histories to memory without error. Strict discipline was applied to achieve this feat, according to postconquest sources such as the Florentine Codex. However, these writings reveal more of an ideal than actual practice.

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the Palmer Method was how American schools taught penmanship. Austin Palmer developed the system in order to replace ornate, sloping forms with a style that could be written quickly and legibly on business account books. The method did not allow fingers and wrists to move. Locking wrists and moving only the arm from the shoulder, students wrote page after page in notebooks. They drew continuous oval loops and slanted push-and-pull lines, sometimes at the rhythmic cadence of a metronome.

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus is a 16-foot-long math textbook. It was copied by a scribe named Ahmose around 1550 BCE from an older Egyptian text. Most of the arithmetic in ancient Egypt involved unit fractions, which are fractions with a numerator of one, but the scribes used special symbols for two-thirds and three-quarters as well. A typical exercise assigned students to divide seven loaves of bread evenly among ten men. Before anyone could begin cutting the bread, they would have to realize that seven-tenths can be expressed as two-thirds plus one-thirtieth.

Qianziwen, or Thousand Character Classic, was written by Zhou Xingsi, a scholar, for the Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (6th century). The rhyming poem consists of exactly 1,000 Chinese characters arranged in 250 short lines, describing the cosmos, the history of humankind, and moral virtues. Remarkably, no single character is repeated. For approximately 1,400 years, schoolchildren throughout China, Korea, and Japan learned how to write it, copying it repeatedly in different calligraphic styles as part of standard literacy training.

From 1603 to 1867, during the Edo Period, sons and daughters of merchants and artisans attended local schools called “terakoya,” or “temple schools.” Their primary task was to copy the Iroha. A poem from the Heian era, the Iroha incorporates Buddhist tenets on impermanence, while simultaneously using each of the 47 characters in the hiragana phonetic syllabary exactly once. With a bamboo brush and ink, the children copied the poem over and over again until they could write the characters with proper stroke order and appropriate ink density.

Long ago in the city of Kish, in modern-day Iraq, students in Mesopotamia were trained as land surveyors so they would later calculate land taxes. A student between 1900 and 1600 BCE was tasked with calculating the area of a right triangle with a base of 6,750 units and a height of 225 units. This student etched a picture of the shape into a piece of wet clay, then bungled the calculations using the formula. This tablet, errors included, is on display in a museum.

Iny-su was a student scribe in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (1981 to 1802 BCE), learning the administrative script called Hieratic. Papyrus was very expensive, so he practiced writing on a wooden board that was coated in white plaster. Iny-su wrote out a formal model letter using black ink. When the teacher reviewed Iny-su’s work, he made notes about spelling and formatting mistakes on the board in red ocher, a natural mineral pigment mixed with water. This custom of correcting text with a red pen has been around for almost 4,000 years.

From 1368 to 1905, in China’s Ming and Qing Dynasties, candidates were required to pass the civil service exams in order to obtain a government position. To prepare for the exams, candidates spent years studying what was called the Baguwen (literally “Eight-Legged Essay”). This particular type of essay consisted of eight parts, and test-takers could not write anything that went beyond their interpretation of the classic Confucian texts or employ colloquial language. Arguments also had to be formulated using identical parallel phrases and quoting the classical text word-for-word.

From the 3rd to the 5th century, pupils across the late Roman Empire learned Greek and Latin together from the same textbook, called the Hermeneumata. The book charted a typical school day through dialogue. You learn how to get up, dress, and say hello to your parents. Then you reach school, hand in your wax tablets, and answer questions from the schoolmaster. The scripts even include you being told off for turning up late, which not only means you’ll know the word “late,” but you’ll also have the vocabulary for everyday classroom discipline at the same time as learning your grammar.

The Mogao Caves, an ancient complex in Dunhuang, China, on the Silk Road, held a hidden library where scrolls dating to the 9th and 10th centuries CE lay in disarray. It turns out these were actually scraps of sacred Buddhist sutras that apprentice scribes and young monks-in-training reused because paper was so hard to come by back then. One scroll was even inscribed with a note by a student complaining of long study hours and expressing fears that his teacher would punish him with beatings the next day.

During the 16th through 18th centuries, students in England and colonial America did not begin their education using books as we know them today. Instead, they began with the hornbook. A hornbook consisted of a small wooden paddle bearing a sheet of paper that was protected by a thin, flattened piece of boiled cow horn. The horn was held to the paddle with brass nails. Printed on the paper were a small cross, the alphabet, some basic syllables, and the Lord’s Prayer, which the child recited over and over again until he committed them to memory.

In 1512, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus published a handbook intended to show pupils at European grammar schools how to compose their Latin with greater variety. To prove that this could be done, he presented the seemingly uncomplicated phrase, “Your letter pleased me greatly,” and proceeded to give it 150 rewrites in correct Latin. Such variation exercises were common in grammar schools throughout Europe, including in Tudor England, and generations of students had to work through them. It was hard work, but the results informed the style of many writers, not least Shakespeare.

In about 1000 CE, Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, whose monastery educated young boys in Anglo-Saxon England, wrote a Latin primer. He made the exercises into a play. One boy was a plowman talking about working outside in the cold. Others were shepherds, huntsmen, fishermen, and cobblers. They all spoke in character so that they could learn how to speak Latin. The play begins with the line, in Latin, that they would rather suffer stripes than remain untaught.

In 2nd-century Roman Egypt, Greek was the language of the state. Children of the upper classes learned to write with a wax tablet, a wooden folding board covered in a layer of blackened beeswax that could be smoothed over and reused. One of these tablets still exists, bearing an 8-year-old’s homework assignment. At the top, the teacher has inscribed two Greek aphorisms, one of which reads “You cannot trust all your friends.” The child has copied these out twice below, and we can see his errors in spacing between words. On the reverse side are multiplication exercises.

In the early 19th century, an American schoolteacher named Warren Colburn published a book on mental arithmetic that became common reading in Anglophone schools. His textbook forbade students from doing their calculations on paper or with a pen or slate. His textbook posed multi-step word problems involving ratios of workers, time, and output, forcing students to work through every fraction in their heads, then go to the front of the room and answer aloud, relying entirely on their memory.

In ancient Rome, aspiring lawyers and politicians studied under a rhetor who instructed them in the art of persuasive speaking. The hardest assignment was the suasoria: to compose a speech in which the speaker took the part of some legendary or historical character confronted with a difficult decision. Seneca the Elder, a Roman author who preserved these exercises, listed the standard themes, such as advising Alexander the Great on whether to cross the unknown ocean. But they also called for genuine skills of argumentation, empathy, and poetic imagination rather than mere encyclopedic knowledge.

This content was created with the help of AI.