If it isn’t enough now to be baffled by our children’s homework, a teacher in the U.S. has taken to assigning homework for parents.

The ninth grade teacher in Montclair, New Jersey, has been asking parents to do things such as read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, a political speech and a Saul Williams poem.

If parents don’t comply, he tells them their children’s grades could suffer. How terrifying it all is. What happens when your 14-year-old gets better marks than you do? What happens when the teacher thinks your child helped with your homework? There would certainly be no more making fun of the boneheads on “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?”

As a parent, the idea would be a bizarre nightmare. Kafka would seem to be a good choice of reading material.