“Six times six is …”
“… thirty-six.”
“Six times seven is …”
“… thirty-eight?”
“What!?”
“Um, thirty-nine?”
“No, no, no. If six times six is thirty six, then six times seven must be. …”
“Forty?”
“Argh!”
“Well, I’m trying!”
With the academic year starting, households all over Washington have been turned into cram schools, where cruel pedagogues (i.e., parents) corral children and make them finish the summer essays, novels, and math worksheets that were assigned by their real teachers back in June.
Everyone knows why children get vacation homework. We understand the danger of “summer learning loss,” in which lessons that were nailed down during the winter magically float away as soon as school gets out.
Of course it’s not unreasonable to require children to do a bit of work over the break. Of course it’s not too much to ask that parents ensure that the work gets done. Yet oh, how oppressive and intrusive it can be!
Children confronted with homework will naturally try to dodge it. Parents faced with children who are dodging homework will naturally become peevish. Both parties are liable to resent the assumption that they’ll spend hours of the supposedly carefree days of summer fulfilling academic requirements.
“I’ve been working on my essay all morning, can I go to the pool?” a child will say, coming down all of 20 minutes after being sent up.
“We each read a chapter!” two children will call, dashing from the room, “We’re going outside now!”
“Six pages is a lot, when the print is so small,” someone will say defensively, when confronted with his lack of literary progress.
“Ugh. Biology. Bane of my life,” remarks a teenager before disappearing again behind the door of a room that, in addition to homework, holds the fatal temptations of Facebook and Skype.
When all other evasions fail, everyone yells: “But it’s summer vacation!”
So we try to reason with them. “Listen, all you have to do is memorize the multiplication tables. Keep avoiding it, and it’ll torture you all summer. Learn them quickly – now – then you’re off the hook!”
We try bribery. “Say kids, if everyone reads for a full hour, I’ll take you out for ice cream!”
When those methods fail (which they do, I am sorry to say) we resort to brute threats. “No sleepovers or movies or dessert or anything else nice, ever, until you children have done your math!”
In the end? The work gets done, of course. And summer ends with children feeling like persecuted innocents, and parents feeling unfairly cast as tyrants.
I’m told this is less of an issue in home-schooling families, perhaps because of the shared presumption that, well, home is where schooling happens. In go-to-school families, this most definitely is not the case.
Perhaps, indeed, summer homework is really just a method of getting us to part with our children again each fall. It will certainly be a relief to have someone else hectoring them about turning in their work.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
