I think I hate homework more now than when I was actually doing it for my own grades. I have four kids, ranging from first grade to a junior in high school. My husband and I work full time, so we get roughly three and a half waking hours with our kids. Most of that time is spent running our own one room school house, with half the kids working with "barriers to learning" in the form of dyslexia, Mysanthenia Gravis and raging ADHD. No licensed teacher in their right mind would consent to work under these conditions.When I was in school, my parents didn't seem to be so involved in my school work. The did a cursory check to make sure there was some ink on the paper and then it was up to me to deal with it. If I chose not to do the work, I suffered the consequences. As I went to post Vatican II Catholic school, those consequences were being held after school and occasional public shaming in front of my classmates. Slapping with rulers was no longer allowed (though rumor had it that if our parents signed a permission slip, they could).I learned how to spell words like immediately and prestidigitation without using spell check (since it didn't exist). I wasn't allowed a calculator in Math class until I was in High School. All of our science fair projects were clearly completed by children, though several topics were clearly recycled through the larger families. On an average night, we now have to complete worksheets, practice spelling words, cut and paste those words onto the (totally stupid) Word Wall, read a story book three times (THREE TIMES!), do a book club assignment, find household objects shaped like a trapezoid, and read for another twenty minutes. That's just the two in elementary school. My husband has to handle the High Schoolers. Divide and conquer, right?My eldest, who has dyslexia, had a teacher who regularly sent home word searches for "fun". For a kid for whom every page of letters looks like a word search, I can assure you, there was nothing "fun" about these word searches. We would spend hours begging, pleading, yelling, and cajoling until we finally just gave up and and did the stupid thing ourselves.Yes. Yes I did just confess to doing my child's homework. Why? Because these days, it's not the kids who get punished when their homework doesn't get done. It's me. I'm the one who gets the pointed notes from the teachers. I am the one who gets pulled aside on the playground. I'm the one accused of "not supporting" their learning process. Never mind that my kids can't participate in organized after school activities because we spend our evenings doing all this homework. Forget that playing outside is strictly a weekend activity. Those worksheets aren't going to do themselves. The irony is that my kids aren't great scholars, despite being very bright. None of them spell well, as rote spelling lessons went the way of Sr. Francis habit years ago. I can't effectively help with Math homework, as the multiplication trees Sr Josephine tortured me with have been replaced with something called lattices that make no sense what so ever to me. And, yes, I KNOW I could learn how to do them. I. Don't. Want. To. I'd rather take the ten minutes of spare time I have to write something or learn to knit, than re-learn a skill that has served me very well since the fourth grade. I don't know what the solution is. I feel for teachers, I really do. Their jobs are in the hands of small children completing scantron sheets. Their curriculum is changed on a dime with almost no input from them. They no longer have the luxury of passing on a love of learning. But I'm not qualified to run a school in my kitchen. I can barely teach my kids to tie their shoes (apparently one thing they don't seem to learn on the street). I'm exhausted. My kids are exhausted. We are all cranky. And I blame the damn homework.
