Home/work
Two or three nights a week, my thankless evening assignment is correcting kids’ homework before they turn it in the next day. The other nights, it’s my wife’s task. How she handles it I don’t know, although based on some of the texts she sends me, I think I would categorize it as “hysteria.” My approach is more varied: thoughtful reasoning, subtle influence, quiet demands, trickery, or screaming and yelling.
Some recent examples:
- To get my 9-year-old, Dietrich, to improve at least part of his handwriting, I started calling him “Dietrina.” Because that’s what his handwritten name looked like on the top of each page. He didn’t like that. Now at least his name is legible. (How to keep the letter “a” distinct from the number “9” is a separate challenge.)
- To instill? in my daughter Emma’s? homework? the idea of where question marks go? and don’t go? when you’re talking? or writing? I started talking the way I hear her and her friends talk: in a manner in which every phrase or pause merits a question mark. This was not a hit. But it did shepherd in a greater attention to punctuation.
- Still with the 13-year-old, who is now doing simple algebra, a.k.a. algebra that I can still follow somewhat, we were at loggerheads over which of us had correctly reduced the equation; she argued for her result, which to me looked flat-out wrong. My rule of thumb in life is this: Only argue a point of fact when you’re sure; this, more than anything, has allowed me to appear to be right more often than not. (This has frustrated my wife for, oh, 28 years now.) Since I wasn’t sure, I proposed this: that Emma and I would each write down our answers on her homework, unattributed, and we’d let the teacher settle it. I now owe that teacher five bucks.
- Dietrich doesn’t want to draw things. I’m with him: Why should nine-year-olds be expected to draw pictures that show a math problem when they’ve already solved them? To him it seems stupid, and I agree. But to me that’s immaterial: the homework clearly states that one should solve the problem and then represent that solution with a drawing. We went around and around on this again town (actually, probably just one around; I’m not one for going around and around) until finally I resorted to Tactic #4, threatening, which if left unchecked leads inexorably to Tactic #4a, screaming and yelling. He obliged by providing a drawing to accompany each problem… except one. He just wouldn’t do the one. I recognized the face-saving effort in that, and inwardly applauded it (mark of character? independent thinker! bold future leader?) before resorting to Tactic #4a.
At some point in all this, my daughter said the wrong thing. Here is what is known to me as the wrong thing: complaining. Some people have earned their right to complain — the people with no fresh drinking water; the people in Lagos, Nigeria who live in the bottom of a pit in the world’s largest garbage dump; the people with missing limbs and PTSD; the long-term unemployed — you get the point. Complaining about homework, especially homework in our suburban public school system, where it might total 30 minutes an evening, gets you nowhere. So when Emma complained about “all this homework,” which involved writing a one-page letter theoretically addressed to the Colonial English court in support of the redcoat side of the Boston Massacre, I tried Tactic #1, thoughtful reasoning. The gist of my argument (and yes, it is square, dull, and plodding, and yes, I have descended into Babbittry — but hey, I don’t know if Sinclair Lewis ever had to raise children who didn’t want to do their homework):
Me: “You go to school only 180 days a year. In Japan, they go 210 days, in South Korea it’s 220, and in China it’s 250. You’ve got no reason to complain. They’re competing with us, and they’re winning.”
Her, tearfully: “Why are they competing with me? Why don’t they just leave me alone? I didn’t do anything to them!”
That was hard to argue with. So I made my way back to Tactic #3: subtle demands.