Homework
Our household needs to take a stand on homework.
In September our principal announced a new school policy, which says that homework is not required because its usefulness for elementary kids is unproven, except for 4th graders and 5th graders because those kids will do homework in middle school because homework is a really important life skill at that age, and for the lower grades homework is optional except there will be a test on all the material covered in class and also for the kids who need extra help on a particular area of study the teacher will contact you to come up with a homework plan on a case-by-case basis.
I don’t like homework because the more I’ve read about child development, the more I’ve learned that kids really just need to play, and make things with Legos and blocks and sit on the couch and be bored. They don’t need homework; they need to do things like fight with each other because sibling rivalry helps kids learn about building productive relationships. And relationships are better indicators of long-term success than mastering spelling words. I think I read that somewhere.
Homework is most certainly not age appropriate for a first grader. Except my child is only six and already behind in school, he’s behind even before he’s begun. I am supposed to “support” him at home although “support” is definitely not another word for “homework.”
I am supposed to “support” him because his handwriting “needs work” is atrocious. The letter g, the letter p and the letter q are all indistinguishable in his penmanship, which looks like a honey badger overtook a lizard and together they produced a bunch of letters that occasionally converge somewhere near the demarcations of the 3-lined writing paper. I can support him by purchasing a handwriting book that has received 122 customer reviews on Amazon, not that I’m jealous, since a book I wrote for parents received a mere 13 customer reviews (can anyone help me out here?). But what none of the Q&As on Amazon told me (motherhood is reading Amazon Q&As) is I am ALSO required to sit side by side with my child and the handwriting book and demonstrate how to write the letter “s” and manage all subsequent productions of the letter “s.”
The other way to “support” him, but this is definitely not homework, is more time reading because he missed the reading level the New York City Department of Education deemed suitable for children who are exactly 55 days into 1st grade. And the best way to “provide that support” is to supply him with a list of books that match his Guided Reading Level, a system developed 20 years ago by two renowned reading experts that measures his mastery every step of the way. Differentiating one reading level from another does not seem completely arbitrary and inscrutable to a lay person. Conveniently the books from the trademarked guided reading level system are available from one of the world’s largest educational publishers whose flyers populate my kids’ backpacks every week and also my recycling bin. The solution here is to buy more of these books. Because I read that if kids haven’t mastered reading by third grade they are in danger of never mastering reading in their lifetime, so we have two years to do this or he’ll never experience the great joy of reading The Iliad over a long weekend in college.
We also need to think about the emotional toll homework inflicts on our household, especially to the fragile psyche of a 9-year-old who will ABSOLUTELY NOT LISTEN TO ME WHEN I TELL HIM HE NEEDS THREE EXAMPLES TO SUPPORT HIS MAIN IDEA and can we please learn that “tried” is not “tryed” and “we’re” is not that same is “were” or “where” and nor, for that matter, is “wher,” which is not even a word, and I super try not to yell about it but I did say this last week. The good news is I am a big fan of the vocabulary workbook the 4th grade uses, the same textbook my brothers used in the early 1980s, and I enjoy the time we’ve spent together as a family trying to come up with the sentences the 9-year-old will have to spit out on the weekly vocab test. For example, I coached him the other day: “you can’t say the ruins of Pompeii are quaint – it can’t just be old, it has to be old and weird, like, you know, things in Granny and Papa’s house.” I THOUGHT my crowning achievement in life was when I helped him with the word reject: “I’m not sure saying you ‘rejected’ your friend’s birthday party invitation shows you know the meaning of reject. A better sentence shows that you know rejects is a harsh no, like: ‘LeBron rejected his hometown of Cleveland when he decided to go to the Lakers.’” But then T told me that LeBron had already REJECTED Cleveland before when he went to Miami… but it would probably be a good sentence anyway. Can we at least agree on that and move on, as a family unit, to all the other vocab words of the week: phase, persuade, persist? Any ideas, anyone?
You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I like homework. It brings us together as a family.