Monday in Australia, homework time here
A recent discovery made me giddy with joy and relief: In the second grade, homework packets arrive on Fridays, giving us the weekend to work on it, too.
In years past, when the packets arrived on Monday, we raced against time on afternoons busy with their activities — soccer or baseball practice, Maker workshops or more. We also had to juggle that with our work responsibilities — pages to edit, emails to send, or a red-eye to hop on a business trip.
In kindergarten, as much as the boys were excited to bring home the classroom teddy bear — with a journal to write about our adventures with him — it always felt like a disaster when we found Bookie in his backpack by the front door, and had to scramble to come up with an entry.
Still in my pajamas, I paged through the worksheets. We were planning to visit the Academy of Sciences later that morning, but we had a tantalizing hour free.
“Let’s get a head start,” I told Gege and Didi.
They disagreed, pointing at the first page of the packet. Their teachers had provided a chart, assigning a worksheet for each day. A worthy strategy, teaching them how to break down work into manageable parts, and we’d always told them they should follow their teacher’s instructions.
But — but. With our babysitter out of town and my husband slated to travel for business, I’d have to oversee homework in a busy week — the same stresses that so many parents I know share, trying to balance work and family life. I tried a different tactic. “It’s Monday in Australia,” I said. A variation of “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere” — only that instead of justifying a happy hour at any time of day, I was making an argument for doing their homework.
The twins insisted on checking with the Google virtual assistant, and unfortunately, I’d spoken a little too soon — even though Sydney is 17 hours ahead of California, it wasn’t yet Monday. They were triumphant. I tried again. “Mama and Daddy are the kind of people who work ahead,” I said. “The people in our family work ahead.”
In college, I never pulled all-nighters; I don’t drink coffee and my thoughts are rather loopy in the wee hours. I’d rather work late as I can,
go to sleep and then get up early to finish. But really, I’d rather finish a day in advance — two days. A week! Crossing off an item on my to-do list is almost as satisfying as finishing the task itself.
“It will help you get into a good school,” I said. Didi and Gege stared at me blankly. College is abstract to them, except for the teams they root for on game day, and they’re far from comprehending the opportunities that higher education offers.
We’re not Tiger Parents, strict and hovering, and neither were our parents, but we also wanted to instill study habits in our boys. At last, my husband convinced them. With the start of the school year, he’d devised a chart to encourage their compliance on certain tasks, including homework.
If they did their worksheets, he said, they could check off those particular boxes, getting themselves that much closer to earning a toy robot.
They had to check off seven out of nine boxes to earn their reward. Asking for total compliance might be too difficult, he reasoned, and that wiggle room would give them a second chance. I agreed.
However, neither of us had anticipated the loophole that our son spotted. On Thursday, Didi told his brother, “We already checked seven boxes — we don’t have to do anything else.”
He had a point. The chart had taught him a lesson, just not the one we wanted him to learn. Or rather, it taught us a lesson: Our son has the eagle eyes of an attorney finding an opening in a contract or a flaw in a courtroom argument.
It didn’t seem fair to change the rules midstream, and yet I didn’t want to let them off the hook. “Daddy said so,” Gege added. I muttered that I’d already discussed the chart with their father, and a revision was coming via email, and somehow, we muddled through to the end of the school week.
Over the weekend, we persuaded them to work ahead once again while I finished this column. So often working parents can feel as if we’re dogpaddling in an ocean, keeping our heads above water minute to minute, but unable to see if we’re headed closer to shore. All we can do is try.
“Mama and Daddy are the kind of people who work ahead. The people in our family work ahead.”