Homework

Should Ollie Understand Lady Di?

I remember when I was first writing here, which is almost three years ago - mad - I wrote a piece on parenting called ‘Everyone Else Can’t Be Doing This’.

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A reader wrote to me and said, ‘in a few years, please do a homework edition’. She had found the adjustment to primary school just as challenging as the newborn phase, as the toddler phase, as the [fill in the blank] phase.

Well, dear reader, the homework phase has arrived and as with all parenting phases, as the youth say, I’m shook.

My kids are currently 7 and 8, learning to read, write and do basic arithmetic. Sounds like simple stuff, right? WRONG. I guess one of the main problems with homework is that a) it is boring and b) I am not a patient person. If I don’t get something right I grunt and swear. I exclaim, ‘Oh Hannah!’ in the voice of my internalised, outspoken superego (she sounds a lot like my first piano teacher who used to collapse over the keys when I got something wrong) and c) I am scared of maths¹.

Homework is a fraught activity because it is something which triggers most of us in some way. There is some lingering educational scarring that gets brought to the surface whether we like it or not.

Could Ollie Understand Lady Di?

Would Ollie Understand Lady Di?

Should Ollie Understand Lady Di?

(You know you were educated in the nineties if Lady Di is part your mnemonic history.)

When I was a kid my mom would make me sit on the deep freeze and recite times tables. She had a cassette tape that would speed through the times tables the first time round, and then a sadistically cheerful voice would say, ‘now it’s your turn to fill in the blanks!’. The tape would rattle off the sums and I couldn’t keep up, I was still trying to work out what 3 x 6 was, and it was galloping forwards to 3 x 7. I was confused. I was stressed. I felt like a failure.

At a friend’s wedding recently we were talking about having music lessons as an adult versus having lessons as a child. I said it all makes much more sense now, like, I can actually take in the advice. As a child my teacher would keep telling me to relax my shoulder, and I couldn’t. But now, I get it, it makes playing easier to be more relaxed. ‘Right, but it is hard to relax when you’re nine years old and your teacher is chiding you, “I said RELAX dammit!”’ said my interlocutor. Quite.

Bonus points for the person who tells me what this rhyme is for:

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle.
Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles’s Father.

But now I’m the adult, not the child, and I now appreciate the utter frustration of having to repeatedly oversee something SIMPLE and BORING, because that’s how learning works. The child feels like you’re the monster demanding things of them, when really you don’t want to be doing this either.

Betty Eats Cake And Uncle Sells Eggs.

For example, the sound of the week last week was “LE”, like simpLE, dimpLE, crippLE. Literally every word you are spelling this week will end this way, -LE. And yet each word is tackled as if it is some idiosyncratic mystery. We pause, we hesitate, we sound it out, we stare off into the distance as if the answer is somewhere on the horizon.

As for maths, I’m still stuck on (in?) the metaphorical deep-freeze and I’m filled with panic when I’m asked to explain something. I start to babble, I over-explain, I say, ‘do you geddit?’ through gritted teeth. And they say, ‘no, you make it very complicated’.

I give a targeted exhale. ‘Why are you angry mom?’ I don’t know. Maybe cos I’m 41 and still doing times tables?

And then I think, like every parent everywhere, however unfair it may be to the school, because that’s not how education works, I know, but ‘what am I paying for?’.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

But maybe homework is like all those other developmental phases I wasted my worries on because they happen in due course and nothing you do is going to make them happen faster than they can. Like walking and running and reading, one day it clicks. It is hard to remember this in the moment, but that is the lesson I keep learning. Most of this is out of my control.

My eldest was a prem baby, so while most babies started smiling at 6-8 weeks, at 12 weeks I was like, ‘Come on buddy! Mommy loves you! Please smile! Look and me SMILING, can you SMILE?’, I intoned with a desperate mania.

And then one day, he did. He smiled. And it had nothing to do with me.

Apparently karma is about coming back again and again to the same thing in different forms until you’ve learnt what you need to. Apparently I haven’t learnt my lesson yet.

1. Fun aside, my Std 7 maths teacher was fired because it was discovered he didn’t actually mark our papers, just assigned random marks. When I got an exam back and had received an ‘A’, everyone knew something was off. To be fair, my struggles started long before he was my teacher. But I think that year was a the real nail in the coffin of my mathematical education.