It’s forty-five minutes past my daughter’s bedtime and my husband and I are arguing over her homework. She can’t finish it in the morning she was cranky and uncooperative when we did that last time he said like she isn’t right now? I counter back.
There was a required evening school program today. So that means after I got done with work and picked up the kids we had just enough time to change them into their nice school concert appropriate clothes and turn around and go back. Concert wasn’t done until 7:30 pm. We still hadn’t had dinner or started homework. Which is why we are now way past bedtime trying to get through a mountain of math.
The question I have is why is my eight year old being given so much math homework that it takes over an hour to complete? She is actually very good at math. It’s not that she doesn’t understand it, it’s the sheer volume of homework being assigned.
She can do the math in her head faster than she can writing it down and showing her work and gets near perfect scores on her tests. All this homework is seeming to accomplish is making my daughter hate and loathe a subject she is actually really good in. The school district in the next town over doesn’t even assign homework to the elementary school children.
Research says a little bit of homework does help, but how do you define “a little bit”? At the age of eight is an hour of just math in addition to the required nightly reading of at least twenty minutes and practicing spelling words nightly a little bit or too much? That is nearly an hour and half of homework on top of a seven-hour school day.
Throw into the mix that math has changed since my husband and I, both college educated adults who went pretty far in math classes, are having to learn new concepts in order to help her. Last week I had my ten-year-old help her because I knew the answer but no idea how to use the new method to get there.
The struggle is real and I know we’re not the only ones. On nights where we aren’t at activities, we try to break up the homework so no one gets too worked up and upset (parents included). Deep breathing, patience, and maybe a little wine after bedtime will help us through this.
She’s in third grade; only nine more years to go.
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https://pixabay.com/en/sad-learning-school-reading-544730/