Shelby had homework last night
Jim told me that he had homework over the phone, while I was still at work. When I got home, I asked Shelby about the homework & he said ‘It’s not homework, it’s just practice’. I asked ‘Are you supposed to do it tonight at home & bring it back to show to the teacher tomorrow?’ & he said ‘Yes’. I decided not to try to convince him that it was ‘homework’. If he wants to think it’s ‘practice’, I think that’s great, actually.
The ‘practice’ made him cry, though. He was working on writing his name. The paper had a rows of lines for writing (you know hard line on top, dotted line inbetween, hard line on bottom). The teacher had written his name across the top line, had written it in ‘dots’ on the next line (for him to connect), then he was supposed to write it out on his own on the next line.
At first he refused to do it. Then, I helped him by holding his hand while he did it. But, he still refused to do it on his own. Crying. Saying that he didn’t know how & that he was going to do it wrong. We kept working on it & talking about how he didn’t have to know how, that if he already knew how, then he wouldn’t have to practice. I talked to him about all of the things that he’d learned in his life & how he had to practice all of those, too, until he got them right.
I asked him what happened when he practiced it at school & he said ‘I got mad there, too’. Poor guy.
His big hangup was the ‘S’. So, we just worked on that for a while. What got through to him best was when I would hold a pencil & he would hold a pencil & his pencil would follow mine as I wrote the ‘S’. That & reminding him that it was like drawing a circle one way, then changing your mind & deciding to go the other way. He was happy & silly about it by the time we finished.
On the way to school this morning, he said ‘I hope we don’t do name writing practice today. I think I need a break from that.’ I told him that if they did, then he should just dive in & do it. Don’t worry about whether it’s right or not. That if they already knew how to do it, the teacher wouldn’t need to teach it to them. That they’re not expected to know how to do it already. I said that if they were already expected to know how to do it, it sure would be silly for the teacher to be teaching it to them. It would be like her teaching them all how to walk or something.
Standing outside the school, after the kids went in, talking to a couple other mom’s. They said that they had tears at homework time last night, too. Wonder why that is…
