Home Work

A few years ago, gripped with the fear that my child was struggling in school and would forget everything he had ever learned by the time fall came around, I started the boys doing summer workbooks.

 The boys liked doing the workbooks. It was a game. When I told the boys I got them workbooks, they begged to start them right away.

Last year things started to get more difficult. Math started to be about adding, and even about (gulp) subtracting. Nathan ended up with a book asking him to write sentences (It had Lighting McQueen, and I swear it said it was for Kindergarten. These Disney folk must have high standards.) The boys started liking it less.

But I am an evil mother. An Evil Mother with a Tiger Mom streak of doom. I decided that I didn’t really care if my kids enjoyed this work or not. I wouldn’t over do it. I got each of them three workbooks, and one journal. And they are usually required to do two pages in each workbook a day (sometimes only one page in the subtraction book, because I know it is more difficult.)

Andy’s books are, of course, much simpler. These are the books we started off with. He writes the letter N. He circles the pictures that begin with N. He gets his work done in ten minutes and bounces off to play.

Nick and Nate have more challenging work. Their books no longer have games, or little cartoon aliens having pizza parties coaxing them through the exercises. Instead, they have to read. They have to know what a noun is, and they have to know which words in a sentence get capitalized. They have to write whole sentences and actually do sums.

Oh. The. Horror.

Steve says I make them do a lot. And this might be true. But a lot is not the same as Too Much. I am not asking the boys to do anything they cannot do. The boys still have plenty of time to play. So I don’t think this is a bad thing. It can only help them in the long run, when they see this stuff come up at school. And it will come up in school. And if it doesn't at least they've learned it here.

But if you listened to the crying and the moaning and the protests…. You would think I was making them sit there for HOURS reading dull history narratives, or doing calculus. In fact, more time and effort is spent on dramatics than on actually doing the work.