Kids With Homework: Am I Helping or Hurting?

A cool thing about being a parent is being able to re-live some of the favorite parts of your childhood with your kids. Not in a creepy trying to live vicariously through them and confusing their successes with yours. But in a way that you can see the experiences in a way that is both from their fresh perspective and familiar in your memories. A less cool thing about being a parent is having to re-live some of the least favorites parts of your childhood with your kids. I have no entered the helping with homework phase of parenting.

I say phase, but phase is something short, or at least something that feels short. Perhaps eon feels more accurate. My oldest daughter just started the third grade and has thus started to have homework. My youngest is still in pre-school. I’m on the front edge of a decade and a half of homework. The older they get, the less help they’ll likely need. Unfortunately for me, the things they’ll need help with now are not my strongest subjects. Spelling and math, while fundamental, are by far the most frustrating subjects for me to help with.

Most of the words my kids ask me to spell don’t give any trouble. Third and first graders don’t come across to many silent letters, words that aren’t spelled the same as they are pronounced, or double consonants. Fun fact – in the middle of that sentence I had to Google how to spell consonants. I was way off. Right now my first grader is working on her high frequency words, which is nice and easy. My third grader has gotten into writing her own stories and asking me how to spell works like patience. My answer is getting closer to “ask your mother” every single day. Spelling tests were always a struggle for me in school, and my spelling ability has been pretty much unchanged since about the seventh grade. Luckily, technology has advanced and everything I send to anybody is typed and spell checked. However, if someday somebody were to come across one of my journals, they’ll wonder how a ten year-old could be writing about such grown up topics, and why does he have such poor handwriting?

So maybe instead of teaching my kids to spell, I’ll teach them to type instead. They work on Chromebooks for certain parts of the day in school as it is, I assume it is just a matter of time before all their work is done digitally. I might not be able to help my kids spell the words in their paper, but I can absolutely help them adjust the character spacing in their paper so they can use less words to hit the page length requirement. Work smarter, not harder kids. Isn’t that a more valuable lesson than why two words can be pronounced the exact same way but spelled differently?

On the numerical side, it seems that so far my daughter and I have the same issue with math homework – showing your work. I didn’t understand it when I was a kid and I don’t understand it now as a parent. What difference does it make if I show you how I know the answer? If I show all my work and get the wrong answer, I’ve failed. If I show none of my work but get the right answer, I’m smart. When my daughter has needed help with a math problem, I’ll help her figure out exactly what they are asking for, and how to find the answer. If she then writes down the correct answer, you’d think that would be a successfully answered question. For some reason math teachers (and even my wife) insist that showing how you got the answer is just as important as the answer. Math is the only subject that does this. In history, you don’t have to explain why you know that George Washington was the first president. Shouldn’t math a results driven business? Do you really care if your accountant can show all their work, or just that your taxes are done correctly?

I am for sure not going to fight is the new way of teaching math. The way I learned math isn’t the way my kids are learning it, and that’s fine. I’m not going to question the teacher or the curriculum. Their job is their job. Plus, so far they aren’t doing anything so complex that need a TI-85, so basic math is still math. As long as they learn to solve for X and do percentages, they’ll be fine. That’s really all the math you use in everyday life anyway. Once they get to high school, then we’ll see how things go, but as long as most of the math problems revolve around which of two people has the most apples, I’m good.

Honestly, one of the more frustrating parts of teaching my kids has been reading. Don’t get me wrong, it is extremely cool and a very proud feeling to see your kids read. Especially when you see how proud of themselves they are. However, there are definitely times when I’d rather rip through their bedtime story in five minutes than have my kid take 20 minutes to work out a Piggie and Gerald. At least once a week they will get tired of it themselves and ask me to finish the last few pages of the book anyway. Even they don’t have the endurance to listen to themselves. But I sit, I listen, I correct. It feels like it’s something that falls into the “you’ll miss this someday” category, right next to 2:00 am feedings.

I know from here on out there will only be more and more difficult homework, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get through it OK. Until they need to do some kind of project like a diorama. If my ability to help with leprechaun traps is any indication, dioramas will be a struggle. On the plus side, you don’t need to show your work when building a diorama. At least it won’t be one of those situations where the kid brings something the school that the parent clearly made. Even if I did, nobody would be able to tell the difference.