Friday, October 21, 2016

And Then I Took a Nap

Last night when I got home from work, Tom informed me that Olivia had one page of homework to do.

I opened her folder and found THREE pages of homework. One was something she’d obviously started at school but hadn’t finished so it counted as homework because, yeah, we needed to finish it.

We sat down to work.

First we did the math. It was subtracting three digit numbers. No biggie, really. Except she also had to write an estimate of what she thought the answer would be AND come up with an number model of how she came up with the estimate. Ugh! So much busy work. I mean, seriously?

THEN! Then she was supposed to write a sentence on the back of the math worksheet explaining how she’d come up with one of her answers. I was all…what? For real? What were they even looking for? I truly didn’t understand what the point of that was. She subtracted…duh.

In the end, that’s what she wrote. “I used subtraction to find the answer.”

I’m sure whoever wrote the worksheet wanted a more in depth answer, such as, “I took four from seven and got three. I realized I couldn’t take seven from six, so I borrowed from the five, which made the six sixteen and the five four…”

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. Honestly, I don’t even think it would have happened with a typical third grader but it definitely wasn’t going to happen with MY third grader.

So the second worksheet was questions about a story we’d read the night before. They wanted to know pretty specific detail and I finally, by the end, just wrote by the last two questions, “We do not have this book at home. We cannot answer these questions.”

We had to study spelling for the test today. “Studying” entails me telling Olivia the word, her writing it down. I snapped at her after the first word, “You don’t have to write in GIGANTIC letters.”

In my defense, I was tired.

So she went the other direction and tried to write as small as she could. Sigh. I told her, “If you’re concentrating more on the size of the letters than the actual words you’re writing, you’re not actually getting anything out of this exercise.”

Then I had to fill out her reading and math log. I know she’s probably supposed to do it herself but , come on, it needs to be legible, okay? Each week, we have to do a second page of the reading log. It’s always a little different but it’s basically trying to get her to actually read for content rather than reading just to prove she can read the words.

When that was done, I had been home for forty minutes and hadn’t even taken off my shoes. I did just that and joined Tom in the living room where he was watching television. I told him I was going to lay on the couch in protest of homework.

I fell asleep about three seconds after laying down and work up over an hour later.

And that’s how I ended up taking a nap on a Thursday evening.

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