I sit somewhere in the middle on this topic.
I review homework each night. I help and walk through the problems if necessary (and lately I've been having to refer to Google to help Domino with his 3rd grade math homework) and I make sure they understand what they're working on. Teachers used to be able to give their students this one-on-one attention, but current classroom sizes make that nearly impossible. I am the only one-on-one educational time my kids will likely get during the day and I better make the most of it.
I get irritated when I see kids come in to school with over the top projects -- like the kindergarten leprechaun trap that looks like something that would appear in Lord of the Rings. Or the massive paper mache dinosaur shaped mailbox supposedly made by a 6 year old. Or the Egg Drop container that has clearly not been built by a 5 year old, but has been designed and built by someone with a degree from MIT. Or when the child wins the award for the new jog-a-thon slogan and she announces "My dad is the best at rhyming!". It is obvious the child had zero involvement in the project with the exception of bringing home the assignment instructions.
BUT...
The view isn't quite so clear from my high horse.
I have been guilty on more than one occasion of taking over a project or two. For example, you should see Domino's 100 day of school project from his kindergarten year...
Kids needed to bring in 100 of something. One came with 100 Cheerios in a baggie, another came with 100 stickers on a piece of paper, and another came with 100 Legos in a box. What did Domino bring? At the time, Domino was a huge NASCAR fan so he wanted to bring 100 of his Hot Wheels cars. I convinced him that he would lose those, so I painstakingly researched photos of NASCAR cars, searching out photos of each car with their numbers 1-100 on the side, and printed out each car to exact dimensions. "We" got a huge roll of butcher paper and Domino glue-sticked the cars in numerical order - well, at least up until about #34 when he got tired of the project and me nitpicking where he was placing each car on the page - and the end result was a 50 foot roll of paper race track with cars glued in numerical order. A very cool looking 100 day project, but I was guilty of a hostile homework takeover. Lesson (sorta) learned.
This week is Valentine's. Both boys need to bring in Valentines for all of their classmates.
I dutifully went to Target and picked out FOUR boxes of Valentines, 2 for each boy, selected each box based on the boy's likes as well as the kids in their classroom. I must have spent a good 20 minutes in the Valentine section, mulling the merits of shiny foil Transformers style versus Clone Wars with pencils, Phineas and Ferb with tattoos versus an unknown brand with silly bandz. Valentines come in packs of 24 these days and since the manufacturers haven't gotten the memo about the increased class sizes of 28+, an additional box was necessary for each boy. I showed them the Valentines I spent so much time picking out and was met with a tepid response at best. It wasn't the "THAT'S AWESOME MOM!" I was hoping for...
... so I became "that mom".
"I can whip up some quick Valentines off the internet", I thought. "I can get some really cool graphics from one of their favorite video games. It can't be hard to come up with some catchy Valentine's phrases. They'll love what I come up with! They'll be the cool kids with the cool Valentines!"
Five hours later and about $50 worth of printer ink, I now have this to show for my Saturday afternoon.
I made EIGHT different styles because I'm just that crazy.
Tomorrow I will battle with the boys to scissor and glue stick, fold card stock, and address 30 Valentines each.
I'm sure if they knew the workload that lies ahead of them with these new homemade Valentines they would have responded more favorably to the Target ones. Maybe that's the lesson they're supposed to learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment