I used to teach fourth grade in a pretty wealthy school district.
At the time, I was in my late twenties and early thirties. It was before marriage and before kids.
In my district, it was pretty commonplace for teachers to tutor kids after school either at their homes or at the public library.
Twice a week I would go to the library and tutor a few kids, and I got paid $75 an hour. I made about a thousand bucks a month from tutoring.
That was eleven years ago. Nowadays teachers in that district get paid at least $1oo an hour to tutor.
While I was supposed to be helping the kids with stuff they were struggling with, I really spent the majority of my time helping them do their homework.
Not because I was a slacker, but because that’s what the parents wanted me to work on with the kids.
I remember at the time thinking to myself, People are paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do homework! This is such a waste of their money! Why the fuck don’t they just do the homework with their kids and save their money?
Then I had children of my own.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Number 3 is in fifth grade, and we just entered the glorious stage of decimals.
Motherfucking decimals.
So last week we spent a good hour and a half learning the difference between tens and tenths, hundreds and hundredths, thousands and thousandths.
After about a hundred and fifty million examples, we had it down. We could read and write any decimal correctly.
Then it was the weekend. We had a three day weekend. We went three whole days without mentioning one goddamned decimal.
Yesterday Number 3 came home with math homework.
Oh goody. More fun with decimals.
He said to me, “Mom, can you help me with my homework today?”
I told him I would, and then he took a worksheet out of his backpack that was identical to the one we had spent almost an entire workweek on the week before.
“This is easy!” I said to him. “It’s exactly the same thing we worked on last week!”
The first couple problems would be a piece of cake. Write the number in word notation.
“So what numbers do you see after the decimal point?” I asked Number 3.
He looked at me like I was speaking Mandarin.
“After the decimal point? What numbers do you see?” I repeated.
Number 3 looked me right in the eye and said to me,
“I have no idea what you are even talking about.”
And in that split second, I completely understood all those mothers back in my teaching days basically shoving hundred dollar bills into my pockets like I was a stripper at the Doll House.
I totally get it now.
And when we enter into the fraction unit, well, I may just have to rob a bank.
Oh the insanity. My class totally forgot all the routines & procedures I’d taught them when they came back from that 3-day weekend. Square one all over again.
I think I get the same blank look when I look at Number 3’s homework :-X Should I start saving up money for a tutor now? haha
Best,
Cassidy
http://tuesdaystantrum.blogspot.com/2015/09/encouraging-letter-to-medical-student.html
LOL! This blog made me laugh so freaking hard! God help my husband and I when we have kids of our own because the homework these kids are getting nowadays is even harder than the stuff I had to do as a kid. I’m sure a lot will make sense once I have my own kids and thinking back to the things my mother would do when I was a young child. LOL
Yes. This! Exactly! I have been cursing Common Core math all week. Why can’t a multiplication problem just be multiplication! Not freaking tally marks, not tape diagrams… My blood pressure is raising just typing this. I need to find $100 stat!
Great post. It speaks volumes about the focus in schools. I understand that parents struggle with providing this type of support so I wonder why we continue to assign the homework that we do. It seems that we need to flip the homework paradigm to encourage all types of parent-led learning for children.
I had a mom ask me what grade homework we were doing during tennis lessons last night. We were doing 3rd grade work. Her daughter is in 1st; she told me she was getting scared listening to us????
She should be scared 😉