Homework Shortcuts For Parents: Let X Be X

School has been in session long enough to have the stench of drudgery on it. By now, you have heard this sentence drop from your child’s face hole:

“I need help with my homework.”

You know you don’t want to help with homework. I know you don’t want to help with homework. You also know what you want doesn’t matter. No matter how much kicking and screaming takes place, the homework must be done. Also, stop kicking and screaming, you’re homeworksetting a bad example.

I want to simplify this process for you. Maybe, homework doesn’t have to haunt you 9 months out of the year.

What is the point of school, anyway? Is it homework? Or is it what our children take away from school? Let’s dispense with helping kids with their homework and rather pass along the lessons they need in order to be functioning adults. By passing along this wisdom instead of helping with the minutiae of homework, we can cut down on tears and day drinking.

Here are some suggestions by subject that you can pass along to your progeny:

History – The only history you need are some key dates. Like when the Civil War took place, or when World Wars started and ended. Forget about the Louisiana purchase. No one expects adults to remember Thomas Jefferson’s shopping spree. You need basics. For instance, you should know why it’s funny in the movie Animal House when John Belushi makes a comment about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor. An obscure and interesting Civil War anecdote is a nice thing to have in your pocket. You should develop a good grasp of history’s context. For instance, don’t mistake “Magna Carta” as another way of saying  “Fresh fruit of the day.”

English – Just make sure your kids know the difference between “they’re”, “their” and “there” and “you’re” and “your”. They will never survive the internet if they don’t.

Literature Cliff notes are your friend. Sure, some books are classics, but there is no good reason to read Ethan Frome. All you need to know about Ethan Frome is that everyone makes terrible decisions and are miserable forever. Of Mice and Men is an amazing book, but the end is so sad that you’ll wind up wanting to chew glass. You might like reading The Great Gatsby, but by the time your teacher dissects the story, your interest will wane. When she hits you with her pet theory that “F” named Tom and Daisy’s daughter “Pammy”, in an attempt to illustrate how namby pamby Tom and Daisy were, you will hate The Great Gatsby for eternity. Get the Cliff notes and read the classics later.

Gym – I know gym class doesn’t usually assign homework, but you do have an opportunity here. Buy a few of those red, dimpled rubber balls and periodically bean your kid in the head with them. It will prepare them for dodge ball and life.

Science – Teaching your children to ignore anything science related is doing them a kindness. Instruct them to let any scientific knowledge dribble from their brains. This way, when they are adults and they are expected to interact with other people who value opinions over fact, they won’t get the “Are you fucking kidding me” headache.

Algebra – This can best be illustrated in a conversation:

Child: “Mom what does “X” equal?”

Mom: “Just let “X” be “X”.”

Child: “But what does “X” equal?”

Mom: “Honey, we are all equal. Or at least we should be. If you create an equation to determine what “X” is, are you being fair to “X”? You have to let “X” be “X”. Be the change you want to be in the world! Stop and smell the roses!”

Child: “I am so failing algebra.”

Mom: “I know sweetheart. The decimal doesn’t fall far from the integer.”

Child: “That doesn’t even make sense, mom.”

Mom, whispering: “Just let “X” be “X”.”

I could cover all the subjects here, but if I do all the work for you, then you won’t learn anything. You get the drift though, right? Maybe, the way to deal with homework is by oversimplifying or obfuscating everything and then walking away. 

33 Thoughts.

  1. Homework sucks! Honestly I hate every minute of it. It ruins our life. There is never time to do anything because homework always gets in the way. Summer is so nice with no homework to do.

  2. I’ve never had to do homework for anyone else, but I sort of miss it for myself.

    Getting good grades was how I measured my personal success for so long that I’ve kind of been in limbo since I graduated. There is nothing as cut and dry as a unit of measurement as getting a final grade every few months.

    And the less relevant for the real world that the test is, the better.

  3. HAHAHA!!!!
    This makes me wanna write a ‘counter-blog’ entry!!
    So. The ‘Halloween Yard Decorating Champion 1456-1462’ FaceBook post of yesterday forced me to ask my son to ‘splain it to me. (I saw the smileys *nodding*)
    He took one look, started laughing and immediately said, “Mom. You know who Dracula is?” Thus commenced my finer educating in historical bad guys.
    I thought he looked like the Jack of Spades. My loving son said, “Could be. They made the face cards after real royalty.”
    Another lesson in History. From my youngest son, the techie science kid who doesn’t drive.
    So. My counter blog post would be how to make your children return the homework help favor by explaining FaceBook posts with History and Science references.
    Math is on it’s own. They should have thought that letter bullshit out better.
    What good are X’s if they go back and forth between math and gender designation?
    Two X’s are for girls and an X with a Y is for boys. All those math problems with letters should be divided up to correlate with their corresponding gender.
    Maybe.
    What the fuck is an X doing all by itself to begin with? Why is it having so many issues with it’s value and self worth?
    Don’t tell me it just needs a Y….
    Damn. It’s a good thing I don’t blog.

  4. I firmly believe there’s no such thing as useless knowledge although school tried very hard to hammer that belief out of me by filling me up with shit I’ve never needed to know. A friend of mine who was a big Sherlock Holmes fan also tried to convince me that there are some things we just don’t need to know by telling me that Holmes never remembered anything he considered useless, that he didn’t even know the Earth was round.
    Aside from the fact that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character I assume that’s why Moriarty always got away.
    “Holmes, he’s escaping!”
    “Fear not, Watson. He’s bound to fall over the edge.”

  5. My parents never helped me with homework, except in 6th grade when we had to make our own metre sticks cuz we were switching to the metric system. My dad, proud owner of the basement woodshop, made mine for me. It was perfect. I liked delegating. My mom only (and very reluctantly, despite being a Francophone) helped with my French homework. Who knew her crappy attitude was encoded in my genes? I also hated helping my kids with their homework. I’ve always felt it was their problem…er, responsibility. I’d answer their requests with, “hey! I ALREADY DID ALL THAT STUFF – IT’S YOUR TURN!” And oddly, they home schooled on and off for a few years. I truly believe that experience helped them understand that grades mean nothing (in the grand scheme of things). Mostly, I encouraged them to pursue their own interests and let the reading/writing/’rithmetic follow. Each time they returned to school they were ahead of their classmates. Funny how that works. It also gave me a vacation from the whole public schooling headache. Damn right I was selfish! (Also, one of the reasons a mom has more than one child is so that the older helps the younger, am I right?)

  6. I get calls when the kids are with their mom. Their dad gets bypassed when the kids are with us. Even when you’re “good” at helping with homework it’s a pain. A honorable pain in the ass.

    Mom helped me with my homework by making me feel stupid I didn’t get it. Dad explained it in such a way that it took all night & I vowed I would never ask again.

    Eventually I did stop asking. So you could say that they taught me to be self reliant. Which was where I figured things out or failed and then cried. Crying generally worked for the male teachers. I am a horrible feminist but whatever…

  7. Homework schmomework. I always hated it. I asked my dad about a drawing of the planets I was supposed to do in first grade… Big mistake. My dad was a surveyor, and before I could stop him we were all over the living room floor trying to place little planets where they would actually be in relation to the sun… He got frustrated because the living room wasn’t long enough (hint: the five acres we lived on at the time weren’t long enough either) and I got frustrated because I couldn’t hand our living room in to my teacher the next day. After that I never asked for help with my homework, and they only very occasionally asked me about it, as long as I kept my grades up.

  8. As I’m just entering the homework years I appreciate your advice, especially about the math. As a big book nerd I’ll probably make her read The Great Gatsby though! 😉

  9. I loved the dodgeball part of the story.

    You were only allowed to hit below the waist. Well. Unless you had my kind of aim. At people you didn’t care for. And there were a few head shots.

    Mind you when I graduated to baseball I learned that I simply couldn’t fucking throw if my life depended on it. No wonder I ended up on first base.

    I could catch a ball with my head. And sometimes with a glove.

  10. My parents never helped me with my homework, and therefore I never helped my son with his. Today I am prepared to retire with millions of dollars in the bank, and my son is even more of a bullshitter than I am.

  11. I can’t help my kids with their math, for the most part, and once my older kid started doing math “the old way”, he stopped getting homework in it. (Praise Jesus. That teacher is getting a bottle of Titos for Christmas.)

    I don’t have a brain for science, so when my son had to work on something for science fair, I had him FaceTime with my dad, because he’s the original McGuyver.

    We take them to Colonial Williamsburg when we visit my MIL and that does it for my annual history contribution.

    I *can* help with writing.

  12. Sorry I’m late again to the party!!!
    Am deep in the throes of homework, reading, learning tables…. nagging.

    I love your line, “The decimal doesn’t fall far from the integer”. In our case, thanx to family history, I think the decimals rolled as far away as we could get. I’m heading for a hill to roll further away, although I don’t at this point want my integers to roll away from me.

    If you catch my drift….

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