After reading about dwindling school attendance and too much homework in your April 3 paper, I decided to write. School classes are not challenging enough and students are losing interest in the classroom instruction.

I am not blaming teachers. We send bright students to college to become teachers and they enter public schools just brimming with new ideas and methods and very anxious to put them to good use. Then they are given a curriculum consisting of textbooks and workbooks for every subject. Their manuals tell them what to teach and how to teach and how many workbook pages to assign to students as homework.

When can a teacher use a little of his or her own creativity to help make a class more interesting? It doesn’t take long for the stars to leave their eyes as new teachers wade through workbook sheets every night. When the teachers lose incentive to make learning interesting it doesn’t take long for the students to follow. Faye O’Leary Hafford Allagash