Tag Archives: homework

On losing it over homework (and why they won’t cooperate)

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Saturday morning (the last day of the weekend here in the UAE) saw me feeling determined: my kids were going to get their homework done early, rather than leaving it until last thing on Saturday night when we’re all tired and would rather stick pins under our nails.

So I sat down at the table, drumming my fingers while the boys shouted out various excuses, from needing to land an airplane on whatever computer game they were playing to being hungry/needing to run an urgent errand/feeling ill etc.

I heard my youngest son chasing the dog. “Bella … Bella. EAT it.”

I finally got them to the table, where it quickly became obvious we might still be sitting there hours later with my boys yawning and feigning snoring over small heaps of crumpled paper.

“I’m not going to do it for you,” I told my eldest. “I’ll sit here doing some work of my own, BUT YOU HAVE TO DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK.” I emphasised the words with a raise of the eyebrows.

Son2: "Mum, can I have a hacking device for Christmas?"

Son2: “Mum, can I have a hacking device for Christmas?”

Son1 shot me a look, and even the plants on the windowsill looked as though they were seeking an escape from within.

Fifteen minutes later, Son1 was still struggling, complaining that he couldn’t find a good website to answer the question he’d been set. I heard the flicking sound of the rubber he was fiddling with – then he dropped his pen on the floor, which always sets my teeth on edge after the third time. At one point, he nearly slid off his chair.

A stare passed between us. I might have felt my face flash hot with annoyance.

It’s at this point that I try to remember what Clive Power, managing director of Dubai-based Power Tutoring, told me:

“It’s usually difficult for parents to help with their own children’s homework. Children like to keep their work/life balance just as much as adults. We don’t like bringing work home and it interfering with our family life, the same is true for children. It would be just as strange for children to have their parents in the classroom as it would be for the teacher to have a meal with the family in the home. So when the parent takes on the role of the educator as well, there’s confusion. Children can even question whether the emotional support and unconditional love will still be there if they get the answers wrong or don’t understand things fully.

“We’ve had qualified teachers who’ve come in and said that they can work with all the children in the school, but not their own children,” Clive continues. “It’s the blind spot on the car, the part of your back that you can’t quite reach to scratch.”

screen-shot-2016-10-15-at-23-23-45So today, as my son continued to whine that not one of the websites he was looking at told him the answer, I tried to bear Clive’s words in mind – then felt the small hairs on the back of my neck rise and lost it with my son anyway.

“You know, your father and I – we had to do this WITHOUT GOOGLE! We couldn’t just type a question into the internet and get the answer, a thousand times over on the screen in front of us. We had to look in BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS to do our homework! There was no Wikipedia, no search engines. No internet!

“Can you even imagine that?” I finished, beetroot red in the face. “Do you even know how lucky you are?”

Son1 gave a small nod, his alarmed eyes as wide as saucers.

The verb hunt

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A new policy I’m trying to adhere to is to leave work on time. Often harder than it sounds, the reason for this is two-fold: the traffic in Dubai is abysmal (again), and my children have seemingly endless homework that needs supervising.

Tonight, I came through the door and called out my usual ‘hellos’. Son2 leapt up from his chair at the kitchen table and ran at me like a torpedo, while Son1 peered at me from behind the iPad, shouted hello loudly, then went back to his game like a techno-crackhead.

“Right,” I said brightly. “Who’s got homework?” I knew they both had work to do; and they both knew I knew. There was silence. Son1 sank deeper into the sofa, and Son2 actually went back to the kitchen table to eat vegetables.

“It’s verbs tonight, isn’t it?” I said, rubbing my hands with glee.

Yes, glee!

You might be surprised to hear that, perhaps oddly for someone who writes a blog, works on a magazine and LOVES writing, I don’t actually know one end of a sentence from the other. A product of the 70s, I learned (learnt?) to read and write at a time when grammar was totally out of fashion.

Back then, British schools were going through a period in which the teaching of grammar was thought to be stifling to creativity (or maybe I spent my childhood staring out the window? It’s possible).

1374281_658095677542759_1305527163_nInstead, I sort of feel my way through a piece of writing – in the same way you’d produce a watercolour painting, I can put together the bare bones of an article, flesh it out and add some detail. A read-through at the end, along with a flurry of fairly brutal editing, polishes it off, and, voila, I’m done.

But ask me about sentence construction, the future perfect or irregular verbs and I’m at a bit of a loss really. If something is wrong, it literally jumps off the page at me – and I can usually fix it (which is what I do in my job as a sub editor), but I couldn’t give you a technical explanation.

Which is why I’m loving the fact that my older son is actually starting to learn all this stuff at school – not only can I refresh my own knowledge, but I can honestly say that witnessing him starting to grasp grammar is a joy.

Until I take it a bit too far. “A verb hunt. Great!” I enthused. “Let’s go through my magazines,” I suggested, and reached for a copy of the business title I work on.

“Now then, tell me, where is the verb in this headline?” I asked him.

Son 1 looked at the page, blankly. He tried, bless him. But it was a story on Iraq, aimed at oil executives, not seven year olds.

“Mum,” he said, quietly. “I really want to do the other homework. The 3D model of a landform.”

They’re going to the planetarium tomorrow, as part of their unit of inquiry on how the Earth works, and he’s so excited.

“Can we make an iceberg, like in the Titanic?” he pleaded.

Grammar was never going to compete, was it?

The things children do for a sugar rush

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The front door burst open and the sound of school shoes pounding on our marble staircase got louder.

“MUU-MMM! WHERE ARE YOU?”

I was upstairs, trying desperately to finish some work in the relatively quiet couple of hours between one school pick-up and the arrival of the school bus.

“Mum, I have to tell you something!”

“What is it BB? What is it?”

Who says only dogs eat homework?

Who says only dogs eat homework?

As I’ve mentioned before, he tells me very little about school, and I usually have to ask leading questions like: “What was the best thing that happened today?”, “Can you act out what you did at break time?” and “Who were the naughty children?”

So I was all ears. The slung-aside school bag, upturned lunchbox and my unfinished column could wait.

“I brought my igloo project home Mum,” [the marshmallow one I posted about last week, after learning that another mum used diamonds]

“Where is it?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Um, something happened.”

“On the bus,” he continued, a guilty look replacing his initial pained expression.

“Did you leave it on the bus? I’m sure the bus nanny will find it.’

“No, it’s not lost Mum…it’s gone…. it got eaten. By the children, on the way home.”

There’s nothing quite like finding out that your son let all his friends devour marshmallows that we’d rolled in glue (while avoiding munching on any himself) to make you rush over to the glue pot to make sure it was non-toxic. Which it was – thank goodness!

Still, I can’t help wondering if there might be a few empty seats on the bus tomorrow.

The homework battle lines

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homework picture

I dread it each weekend, I really do – knowing that my 7-year-old has three sets of homework due the next day and that the only way it’ll get done is by brow-beating him into it, breathing down his neck and practically jumping up and down with excitement when he completes each task.

Quite honestly, extracting his teeth would be easier (and quieter).

Back in the dark ages, when I was 7, I’m sure we didn’t have homework. Maybe there was a library book each week, perhaps a reading book too, but I really think that was about it until secondary school (or did I completely miss something?).

But times have changed, it seems, because children these days, even those who are only knee-high to a grasshopper, have enough homework to sink a mummy ship. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just that if you have a son who’d rather scoop his eyeballs out than sit down and do homework, it becomes a tedious – indeed painful – chore.

BB is in grade 1. Today, I got emails with his French and Maths homework. There’s English language homework each week, too, and Arabic, which we can’t understand and can only watch in amazement as he forms Arabic letters in front of our eyes. On top of all this, they have spellings every week that they’re tested on in class, and they bring reading books home.

It feels like A LOT – and I’m beginning to realise why I’ve heard mums say full-time work is impossible, because managing this kind of homework load in such small children is a job in itself.

I have to admit that, if BB is cooperating, I rather enjoy the spellings and language homework, and have to practically sit on my hands to stop myself grabbing the pencil and scrawling a sentence myself – but I’m no teacher, and the frustration I feel when BB writes backwards / will only write sentences with the word poo in / or can’t be bothered is off the scale.

Behind every little boy doing homework there's a mummy working three times as hard

Behind every little boy doing homework there’s a mummy working three times as hard

And I also grimace with frustration when the homework requires items that I never seem to have to hand. Glue, highlighter pens, newspapers, dice, flash cards, different coloured biros – my stationery supplies always seem to let me down.

So, imagine my dismay when I opened the homework book last week to discover the treat the teachers had set us:

“Make a tornado”

“Please help your child make a tornado by following the instructions…”

Yes, really.

You will need: a water bottle, clear liquid soap, vinegar, water, glitter and food colouring.

I won’t regurgitate all the instructions, but they involved shaking the bottle to mix up the ingredients, swirling it in a circular motion, and adding the food colouring and glitter.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the mess potential here? (and wonder if perhaps the teacher was getting her own back?)

Bring on the spellings, I say – I’d rather drill BB in spellings than unleash a tornado at home any day.

The transition from work to mummydom

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I’ve come to the conclusion that never mind massages and spa treatments, what I really need after work and before going head first into a long weekend with two small boys is a decompression chamber.

It was nice and quiet down there! Anyone else feel like they get the bends when they transition from work to home?

Maybe it’s just me, but after being in an office where everyone sits still, the computer more or less does what it’s told and the noise levels are fairly muted, suddenly being reintroduced to the demands of two energetic boys is like surfacing too fast from relatively tranquil depths.

The decibels, the goading, the speed at which the boys fly round the house, the way they ricochet off the walls (summer temps mean we can’t exercise them outside), their neediness after my absence – whilst I’m overjoyed to be back home, it makes me feel quite giddy.

So, now it’s the weekend – and it’s a long one because Sunday, when we usually all go back to work and school, is a holiday for the ascension of Prophet Mohammad. And DH is out of the picture because he’s ‘in the Sim’ – airline lingo for training in the simulator, during which they practice fires, engine failures and other such scenarios.

My mind is thinking about something less terrifying but which has left me scratching my head nevertheless – BB’s homework.

It’s that time of term again when instead of doing the usual spellings and reading for homework, he has to complete a project – and present it – for his end-of term summative assessment. All very well, but he’s six. Some of his classmates are five. They’re in kindergarten!

Last week he had to design a ‘mode of transport’, this week he has to create it. There was the option of using Lego, but that would have been too easy. He’s opted to junk model a train, and so I’ve spent much of the week collecting boxes, buying art supplies and wondering how to turn cereal packets and toilet rolls into an express train.

As my working friend put it, there’s no way such young children can do these projects on their own. So when little Johnny comes home from school and says he has to create a solar system, it’s mum who ends up printing off stuff at work, coming up with ideas (styrofoam balls on sticks? genius!), and cajoling a child who can’t sit still for two minutes (heaven knows how mine gets through six hours of school) into completing the project. On time.

And, with all the tiger-mothering that goes on in Dubai (including presentations by seven-year-olds on iPads!), you really need to make sure your child takes it seriously. BB’s told me some of his classmates have brought their projects in early. On display already, there’s a rocket made out of bottles, a flying car and a train with wooden wheels.

By the end of this week, I’m fully expecting there to be 4by4s made from matchsticks, robotic trucks and remote-controlled airplanes.

I’d better get back to those loo rolls…

Jet-setting grandparents

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As I mentioned earlier this week, BB’s class is nearing the end of a Unit of Enquiry (the lingo in the international curriculum) into how things have changed over time.

We’ve all worked quite hard on this, completing a questionnaire asking things like, ‘Did you have a television back in your day? Or a washing machine?’, working on a poster as homework and going along with the premise that our kids think we’re really quite old.

With a shared love of train sets, BB and his Grandad can hang out for hours

They’ve even had grandparents into the school to meet the class and talk about life in the past.

This led BB to come home asking me why his grandparents don’t live with us.

Imagining one big happy household crammed full to the rafters with his Nanny and Grandad from England and his Jiddo and Tata from Lebanon, he thought this would be a marvellous set up for everyone.

“Well, dear, we do try to see them as much as possible,” I replied “and we’re really very lucky that you have such jet-setting grandparents.”

“Ummm,” he sighed, a little dejectedly, clearly not persuaded that this was enough. And then dropped a clanger, said in a way only cheeky but affectionate little boys can get away with:

“If Grandad lived with us, I could count the hairs on his head.”

A note on competitive parents

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Homework for kindergarten kids is a new concept to me, but I hear that it really kicks off from next term and can be a nightly battle.

To prepare BB’s class of five and six year olds for this, they had their first proper assignment this weekend – the kids had to research an object, such as a toy, television or car, and produce a poster at home, showing what the object looked like in the past and what it looks like today.

And the most worrisome bit: ‘Your child will then present the poster to the whole class as part of their summative assessment,’ the teacher told us.

And, believe me, this made me nervous. Not just about the presenting part, or actually making the poster, but because you wouldn’t believe how competitive expat parents in Dubai can be.

“I know, let’s visit the museum this weekend to do some fact-finding,” I imagined the other mums saying. “And work on some mock-ups first. Even better, why don’t we fly to London to browse the British Museum.” “Yes, and once we’ve finished the conceptuals, we can do a historical key in PowerPoint,” their DHs, getting into the swing of it, probably reply. “That’ll really knock the socks off the teacher.”

BB and I finally got down to it on Saturday afternoon, his attention captured momentarily because I stole an idea from the recent National Day celebrations – a classic car parade! It kept him focused for, ooh, all of 30 minutes, before he legged it to the play area.

Two hours later, I’d finished the poster, cleaned up the mess and hidden it so BB’s little brother wouldn’t scribble all over it – just in time to start thinking about dinner.

I think I’m going to be busy next term, when homework really gets going.

Colouring, cutting, sticking - I was in my element!