On The Home(work) Front

There is a reality TV spoof waiting to be born called “Homework Wars!” Each week would follow the progress of three teams of parents and adolescents as they make their way through a predictable, but emotionally gripping, story arc in which the following occurs: Child does homework; parent reviews homework and tries to discuss it with child; child melts down, rallies, takes it the rest of the way, but then goes to sleep too late. Of course, I myself wouldn’t know about these matters, but I hear they’re not uncommon.

Okay, so I think I get what’s wrong with the scenario, and a wonderful book—The Gift Of Failure: How The Best Parents Learn To Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed—gave me more insight (than I had) into how well-intentioned parents aren’t really doing their children a favor by inserting themselves into the homework process and other responsibilities that their kids could take on with little parental supervision.

In that spirit, at the beginning of the school year, my wife and I pulled way back from checking our 11-year-old son’s homework. But then, about seven weeks into his first semester in middle school, we learned that Adam was missing a lot of homework assignments (i.e. missing them because he wasn’t doing them). No wonder middle school seemed to come so easy to him!

Discussion ensues. Talk of how to be more organized ensures. And we tilted the needle back toward the occasional checking of homework, with periodic discussions of challenging assignments if raised by him.

The tricky part of that (for me) is helping him better understand an assignment without inadvertently doing it for him. This has had me thinking a lot about what it means to teach. If you show a child how something is done, have they really learned it? How do you break it down into building blocks which they can understand so that they can then comprehend (on their own) the larger picture?

I’m babbling here, but I suspect a lot of parents can relate.

The other night, after Adam and I were hurtling toward a painful emotional impasse over a bit of writing, I suggested a way forward that we both liked. I would talk about one—and only one—of the five problems he had to address, with the hope that, by illuminating one aspect of writing (elaboration), he would learn more than if I had picked a part all of his answers and had 20 suggestions.

We wouldn’t win “Homework Wars,” but I’m trying to play the long game: Hopefully helping him to learn something well; requiring him to do most of his work without help; hopefully allowing him to get the grade, the pride, and the learning experience—for better and worse.