It Is My Own Work

A good number of my friends are at the stage in their lives when their kids' homework is beginning to get both the better of them and beyond them. I keep seeing Facebook posts bemoaning homework. 

I don't have kids, and have no plans for any, so I'll probably never be in a position to complain about having to help with homework, or make sure homework is done, or check homework, or do anything connected to homework in any way, shape, or form.

But I can't help wondering why more parents don't give up earlier. I'm not sure when exactly it was when my mother gave the handling of my homework entirely to me, but as I remember it was somewhere around 4th grade. I was a stubborn child (I'm no less a stubborn adult) and I remember a specific incident when Mom had had enough. She took my homework paper and threw it away. This caused much frustration to me. Her argument was that if I didn't want to do it, there was no reason to keep it cluttering the house. So to the garbage the crumpled paper went.

After that moment, she only took an interest in my homework when I specifically asked for help with something. Homework was my responsibility. My brothers were treated the same. Homework was the responsibility of the student, not the parent. If we didn't do it, the consequences fell entirely on us. There were no consequences to my mother for our failure to get our homework done. We were expected, no, required, to "work up to our potential," but the doing, or not doing, of homework and/or projects was entirely our own affair.

In many ways I am glad my parents turned the handling of my homework over to me as early as they did. In retrospect, it was one of their first lessons on taking personal responsibility for my own work. If something was going to get done, I had to get it done. That meant I had to budget time for it, and make sure it was done to a standard I found acceptable. It also meant that the work that was done was my own, on my own terms. As my parents told me, they had already been through high school algebra, they knew it. It was my turn to figure it out. And as for many other things in life, sometimes the only way to get through things is to figure them out for yourself -- from folding sheets to algebra, from eating bone-in chicken daintily to making gravy, everyone has to come to their own conclusions and figure out their own ways for doing things. It's not so much a case of teaching the subject to yourself, but arriving at your own understanding of it.

I still have trouble with algebra and I don't think I'll ever be as knowledgeable as my mother of grammar, but I managed to finish grade school, high school, and college with honors figuring out my own way through the subjects -- and handling my own homework. My parents were there for help. I can't count the number of times my Dad offered lessons in the use of a slide rule, and I would not know where to begin to measure the sheer numbers of paragraphs my mother proofread for me. But the work was always my own.

The end result was that I learned a lesson beyond what the homework was meant to enforce. Now that I'm an adult, I am sure the end result for my parents was far fewer headaches!

I know none of my friends will take advice on homework from a childless person, but I really think more parents should turn the handling of their children's homework over to their children far earlier than they do. In the long run, it benefits everyone.