No One Ever Looked Up From Her Deathbed and said, “I wish I’d spent more time doing homework.”

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HomeworkLast night, my six-year old was trying to fix a broken toy on our kitchen table. Dinner was over, and I was shoveling dishes into the sink. He’d requested a Phillips head screwdriver, removed the battery covering, and changed the batteries. It still wasn’t working.

“Maybe,” he told me, “some of the wiring in there needs to be tightened up. I can just open this hatch and get in there and see.” He was frustrated, his eyes focused on the problem, a dogged look on his face.

I LOVE that look. It represents the heart of one of the most fundamental lessons I want my kids to learn:  hit tough problems with determination. TRY, with persistence, if your first solution doesn’t work. Figure it out. They’re the very skills my son struggles with, and here he is – flexing those very muscles.

I looked at the clock and winced. 6:50. I swore to myself under my breath; he’ll have to stop. Homework time is 6:45, and non-negotiable.

Formal education hasn’t been a natural fit for my son, so we’ve had to do a significant amount of shoehorning. He’s young for his grade, and hard-headed stubborn passionate about his own interests, which don’t include doing worksheets, and very much don’t include writing. He’s apt to daydream and can happily mentally check-out of any classroom activity he finds either too mundane or too challenging.

I’m his mother, so of course I think he’s a total genius. His teachers have always described his scholarship the same way they described mine when I was young: “Quite bright, but…”

The “but” gets you every time, doesn’t it? Quite bright, but won’t complete work. Quite bright, but won’t try. Quite bright, but disorganized, uninterested, distractible. Similar phrases were written one every one of my report cards until college.

To support him through those tendencies, we give him structure, develop systems of rewards for completing tasks, and continue to muddle through until his brain catches up with his “but.”

It’s the structure I’m up against, here, with his eyes focused on taking a part a toy to see the wiring. Homework time is fifteen minutes, every week day, between 6:45 and 7:00, whether he has “homework” or not. He practices his reading, normally does a math sheet, and makes progress on a weekly packet due every Friday. He also works on anything that he decided wasn’t worth his time during the day.

I helped him fix his toy, and then redirected him to his fifteen minutes of slap-dash structured work. He completed it in an antsy, disengaged way, eyes rolling. I support his teacher, support his school, and above all want to teach him that his academic engagement is something I value. Therefore, I’m willing to break into quality play to complete some worksheets, despite paltry evidence that homework in elementary school improves academic success (and some evidence that too much if it might hurt). And despite evidence that kids simply need time to play.

In first grade, I wouldn’t call fifteen minutes per day excessive. It’s not, on most days. It’s just that, to serve the god of structure, we must make sacrifices. And sometimes those sacrifices would have taught him far more than homework.

I wish there was recognition that a kid’s time, a SIX-YEAR OLD’S time, is a valuable thing. Homework replaces something. And yes, sometimes that’s Minecraft. But sometimes, it replaces free play with his sisters, tinkering with toys, pounding on the piano, exploration, running around in the back yard. Those are priceless, and frankly, fleeting.

He’ll have formal homework for the next decade or two, depending. Hopefully, the desire to take apart a toy to see its guts lasts until he has time to get to it.

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