(A brief departure from the Ireland blogs, for a comic interlude…)
Its official, I have figured out just what is wrong with kids these days. We as adults have bought into the idea that are children are little prices and princesses and thus, should be treated as such. You all probably already knew that. But the real breakthrough that I have made is the discovery of the perpetuators of this idea. First grade teachers. In their unassuming denim, school spirit t-shirts, and bright-eyed smiles, they stroke the egos of our 6 and 7 year olds by assigning “Mommy (and Daddy) homework. Every assignment that I have been asked to assist Redden with are in fact, assignments for me.
For example, the first was the assignment which asked parents to help their kids find numbers around the house, cut them out, and paste them on a sheet of paper. Can you really see sending your child around the house with a pair of scissors and the liberty to cut anything with a number? There goes your American Eagle shirt with the number four on it. Twenty dollar bill? Not anymore! Work presentation notes with crucial budget numbers? Better be looking for a new job my friend. And at 6.75 years old, Redden is more likely to cut himself or an expensive leather surface than he is to actually cut the numbers out of something correctly. And may I add, if my son doesn’t know what a number looks like, what does that say about his school? Last year he was adding, subtracting, multiplying, and doing calculus – clearly they are regressing.
Anyway, that was my first taste of Mommy homework. Naively, I assumed that this was an extraordinary circumstance and that we would settle into our predictable worksheets in no time. Boy, was I wrong. The next assignment came packaged deceptively like Kindergarten homework. I pulled out the familiar worksheet/book combination, glanced at it, and dropped it on the table. As I started to walk away, prepared to work on it another night, something clicked and I realized that this was not the old “friend” but a new beast of burden. One I hadn’t seen before and one that I didn’t understand. (Yes, we are still talking about 1st grade homework). I backpedaled to the table and began the first of many heavy scans of the text. At the top was a note that says, “Keep sheet in bag and return to school everyday.” Yet at the bottom of the page it said, “Return worksheet on Friday.” Huh? In between these indecisive notes were some questions and a bunch of gibberish. I finally deduced that Redden and I needed to read the story then he should answer the questions out loud. I assumed it to work in the same manner as the kindergarten homework, use the same sheet to answer questions out loud about different books. Not so. The next afternoon, as Redden unpacked his backpack, out came the same book and the same worksheet. This time, Beth and Jen were with me. They can vouch for the obscure nature of this assignment. As we realized that this was indeed homework for me and not so much for Redden, I stomped my feet and declared that I would not participate in Mommy homework. But as a new day dawned, a lump rose in my throat just thinking about getting the same stupid worksheet sent home for a third time. I quickly scribbled the answers and jammed it in Redden’s backpack.
The kicker in this is that Redden spent minutes hee-hawing about how the teacher had said that this was Mommy and Daddy homework. I don’t know if I believe him or not, but something twisted in my gut as he said it. It felt real. And that got me thinking, ‘is his teacher one of those adults who think that childhood should be so well cushioned, that parents should bear the brunt of the life for the first 18 years of their lives?‘ In that case, I am doomed to re-live at least first grade (a grade in school that was very very bad for me – I was almost held back…), if not more depending on how many more of these Peter Pan teachers Redden encounters in his life. No doubt that I am definitely seeing the case for home schooling or better yet, revoking the child labor law and letting him get some real hands on experience!
