Second Grade Homework

We spent an hour and a half last night on homework.

An hour….and a half. Ninety minutes total.

And by we, I mean Olivia and I spend an hour and a half working on things for school.

It was a nightmare.

We started the homework at 5:30, after I spend a half hour trying to figure out how to print the report Alyssa had spent an hour typing on our computer. We don’t have any Microsoft Office programs on our stupid computer and so she’d typed it using some word processing program she found online. But our computer wouldn’t print it without an Adobe serial number. So dumb. We ended up copy and pasting it into Notebook of all things and it worked. I informed Tom that we need to gift the entire family with Microsoft Office for Christmas and that it needs to be an early Christmas present at that.

But yes, Olivia’s homework. Ugh!

Not only is it tedious for me, it’s torture for her. Her fine motor skills are still weak and so after writing her spelling words for me (one time only, but if she misses any, I make her write those three times for practice) I found three pages of homework in her backpack. Two pages were all about the spelling and the last was math. She was so frustrated with just the writing portion of the whole thing that I wanted to cry.

We pushed through though and in the end, while we were cranky as hell, we were also proud of the work we’d done.

Then today, one of her teachers emailed me to check in and when I mentioned the horror of the homework, she told me that it would be okay if I write some of O’s answers for her. Which…yay? Yes, okay, yay. It will still get done, it will still be her answers, but I will write them out some of the time.

I hate that the act of writing sometimes gets in the way of us knowing what Olivia knows.

Well, that and her attention span, which is sometimes that of a gnat. There is just so much she’d rather be doing than addition or spelling words.

I want to say, “Suck it up, kiddo, you’ve got ten more years of this.” As if that would make a difference to her in the moment when she's bored and tired and eight years old. Instead, I just try and refocus her ever three seconds. Like I said, it’s way fun for both of us. Sigh.