Helping Your Kids with Their Homework
May 21, 2010, By Ron Mattocks 0 comments
I’m going to make a generalization by saying most parents were less than thrilled about homework-laden evenings during their time in school. Okay, okay, I realize that wasn’t true in everybody’s case, especially for those kids who squealed with delight as they shot their hands straight into the air with the desperate hope the calculus teacher would call on them to solve the jumbled mix of numbers and letters scrawled on the blackboard in front of the classroom.
I used to tell myself that those kids only acted that way because they needed to receive external validation, something I obviously didn’t need given the consistent string of C-minuses I received on the regular quizzes covering the previous day’s assignments.
Following graduation from high school, I remember the great feeling of relief that came over me, like someone had lifted a three-ton anthology of American Literature from my back. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I was something, something to quote my old history teacher who mentioned something along these lines in class once.
Yes, I did go on to college which meant several more years of being subjected to terms papers, handouts, and projects; but somehow, all the parties during the week, the lack of parental boundaries, and the pursuit of the fairer sex was more than an ample trade off in making up for the corresponding drudgery. What’s more, being esteemed as adults by the faculty and staff, it was now acceptable to ask for their leniency when it came to assignments and expect to be heard in the process.
For an ethics class, I had a term paper worth half the course grade that I turned in several weeks before the due date. The following class, the professor returned the paper with a large “F” at the top, the sole explanation of which coming in the form of two words—“wrong format.” I immediately corrected my mistake and handed in the paper once more, still beating the deadline by a solid week.
The professor thanked me, but then informed me the highest grade he could give me was a D-plus since I failed to follow his original instructions. Given the weightiness of the assignment, I subsequently received the same grade for the entire class despite my protests.
Okay, so I didn’t say the faculty actually granted your requests; I merely said they listened to them. Incidentally, in retaliation for my ethics professor’s ruling, I wrote a harsh evaluation of him at the conclusion of the semester. He may have been teaching there for the past forty years and was so old he had to carry an oxygen bottle around, but that didn’t stop me from claiming he flirted with the female students and showed them preferential treatment.
“His pious and feeble demeanor are just a clever ruse meant to fool both unsuspecting students and administrators alike,” I believe was how I put it, confident it would earn him a few disapproving remarks from the department head. How do you like those ethics, Professor?
But that was ages ago—water under the bridge. Homework is a thing of the past, something never to be contended with again …or that’s the lie I lulled myself into believing until the day my oldest stepdaughter came home from school and handed me some cartoonish looking worksheet so complex it rivaled a 1040EZ tax form.
Remember all those times in school when you questioned why you would ever need to use what was being taught? This is why: because you need to retain some semblance of this knowledge in order to assist your own children when they are tasked with the same homework later in life. Unfortunately for me, I flushed most of what I learned (and then some) right after leaving college.
At first helping with homework wasn’t too bad. C is for cat, two plus one is three—simple stuff, stuff I could do in my head on the spot, but that was a few years ago. Now I’m contending with such mindbenders as: “Sally has three tickets to the concert; Jay has four. How many friends can they both ask to the concert?” Let’s see, nine, carry the one …added to Jay’s… Okay, seven. I compared this against the five my stepdaughter penciled in the empty box.
“Allie, you need to redo this problem,” I said putting a check mark next to her answer.
“What?” she said in a high-pitched, disbelieving tone. “It’s right.”
“You need to redo it.”
“No, it’s right.”
This went on for a few moments until I used the one tactic that always trips the girls up when they get an answer wrong. “Explain it to me then,” I asked leaning back in my chair and folding my hands behind my head.
Allie then took the paper from me and scrunched her nose.
Gotcha.
“It’s five,” Allie repeated. “Three tickets plus four tickets is seven, minus Sally and Jay’s two tickets means they can bring five friends. Five.”
Wait. I sit up and rehash her logic in my head before realizing I might want to read the book, Homework for Dummies. “Well then. Very good, Allie. I was just, uh, testing you to see if you really knew the answer.” This is a lie of course but you can never show weakness in front of the children when it comes to homework or else they will start to doubt you in other matters eventually leading to a complete deterioration of your credibility every time you open your mouth.
Not to make excuses, but sometimes the material used for their homework is a little distracting. Keep in mind this is Texas, a state that feels entitled to a few perks just because it supposedly was a country at one time—or so it says in one of the girl’s social studies books. (See what I mean?)
For example, my youngest stepdaughter, Avery, brought home a spelling list last week that she was supposed to put in alphabetical order. In and of itself this isn’t a big deal except that I had to question the choice of words she was given. I may have been away from the halls of academia for a few years, but y’all, muddin', ropin’ and use’uns I’m guessin’ aren’t going to fly in a game of Scrabble.
And there have been other Lone Star-laced question such as, “If Roger Clemens threw 35 strikes, 6 balls, and no hits how many pitches did Mr. Clemens make in total?” (I insisted on answering this one myself, pointing out that Roger Clemens hadn’t been able to pitch that long without at least one hit thus far in the current season. The teacher marked it correct.)
Yet, for all my admitted difficulties helping the kids with their homework, I am still a stickler over the quality of their work. Not only does it have to be correct (as far as I can tell), but is has to be uniformly neat as well. Many an assignment has been repeated more than a few times before meeting my high standards much to the dismay of the girls who are content to scribble out answers in whatever haphazard fashion they feel like. This results in a scene that plays out over and over again.
“This ain’t gonna fly,” I’ll say.
“But why this time?” they’ll whine.
I’ll hold the paper up for them to come get, adding something like, “Because it’s still so messy I can’t tell if these are periods or commas.”
Sure it’s picky, but better to be hard on them now rather than later when they’ve already formed a subpar work ethic. And besides, even if they don’t have the correct answer they’ll at least look good on paper.
Watching them trudge off, I sometimes wonder how they would fill out a course evaluation on me at the end of the school year. But even if they could it wouldn’t matter. I’ve got tenure.
Ron Mattocks is a father of five in Houston, Texas and the author of the book Sugar Milk: What One Dad Drinks When He Can’t Afford Vodka. He is a featured contributor to ManoftheHouse.com.
