Out There: The homework helper

Teachers typically assign too much for your average kid to handle. And so, parent ‘supervision’ becomes parent "coproduction," highlighting parental inadequacies.

By HERB KEINON
Out There 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Out There 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It’s 7:30 p.m., an odd time for a phone call from my daughter in her second year of Sherut Leumi at a youth village in Afula. Usually the young lass calls much later, past the bewitching hour when she helps the 12 kids nominally under her charge do homework and get ready for bed.
“Abba,” she says hurriedly, “name me some languages” “Huh,” I huh.
“Languages, you know what people speak. Languages.”
“OK, you got your English, French, Spanish, Russian,” I start, sounding like an add for the Rosetta Stone.
“I know those, Abba.
Tell me some I don’t know” “Urdi,” I say, mangling pronunciation of the word Urdu, the second most prevalent language in Pakistan. Then I run to The World Almanac, look up “world languages” and dazzle her with a list of exotic tongues from Nyanga in Mali (“Abba, how do you spell Nyanga in Hebrew?”), to Tagalog in the Philippines, to Tajiki in Tajikistan.
And then I laugh. This whole episode struck me as a perfect example of what I call the “homework dilemma.” There was my sweet daughter obviously helping one of her elementary school charges do a school project, when she hit a brick wall.
The teacher asked the kid to list some languages, but the kid couldn’t come up with anything beyond Hebrew, English, Arabic, Amharic and Russian. The kid asked my daughter, but – other than throwing in some romance languages – she didn’t have a clue. The daughter asked me, but I also couldn’t recall from memory anything more exotic and had to turn to the trusty almanac. Essentially I turned to the almanac to do homework for some kid I’ve never met.
I don’t know what the kid learned from this whole exercise, but I now know that Tagalog is spoken by 24 million people around the world, that more folk actually speak Spanish than English as a first language and that some 845 million people speak Mandarin Chinese, making that the most widely spoken tongue on the planet.
Ah, the beauties of education.
THIS RATHER odd homework chain is also not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon.
On a recent trip back to the States I planned to visit an old friend in West Virginia. In our e-mails he said he could meet anytime except four to five in the afternoon, because then “we work on Cal’s homework.” Cal, of course, being his third-grade son.
“Shouldn’t Cal be doing his own homework,” I write back.
“He does,” my friend replied. “I just supervise.”
Yeh, right, I think, just like I supervise.
It’s a tough predicament, this homework thing. Teachers have a tendency to give too much, beyond the true work capacity of any normal elementary or junior high school kid.
My youngest boy, for instance, came home one day last year in eighth grade with assignments to do 20 pages of math, an equal amount of Hebrew grammar, summarize Rashi on part of the weekly Torah portion, read over the halachot for Hanukka and do an English report on volcanoes.
Now there is no way your typical kid can handle all that. So the kids turn to their folks, who decide to “supervise,” as my friend said. But the average father, with other things on his plate besides finding out how lava is formed, realizes he can look up “volcano” on Google faster than his son, and “supervision” soon morphs into coproduction.
In short, the teachers assign, and the parents do the work. I’ve learned more from my children’s eighth grade assignments than I ever learned when I was actually in that grade.
But this whole homework thing also highlights parental inadequacies. Math homework I never attempt, sending the children to their mother for that.
The Torah homework always depresses me, forcing me to come face to face with the reality of how little I know. I mean, should I really be stumped by a piece of Gemara the kids are learning in the seventh grade? As a result, I dread homework time almost as much as my children – first because it makes me feel dumb, and second because it makes me feel guilty.
And this guilt has me coming and going: I feel guilty for doing the homework with/for the kids, knowing – because The Wife constantly reminds me – that this does not exactly foster independence. But I feel equally guilty if I don’t do it – especially if I don’t have the time. I mean, what kind of father doesn’t have the time to do his kid’s English assignment? The absolute worst, however, is the Hebrew language and grammar units.
When questions arise about this material the children are advised to just go ask the neighbors. No way am I equipped to help them acquire Hebrew language skills. In fact, I struggle mightily just to write a note to the teacher asking permission for my son to leave school early for a dentist appointment.
“Honey,” goes the cry, “do you spell rofeh [doctor] with a heh or an aleph?” “I don’t know, look it up,” comes the reply.
And so I do, spending five minutes writing a three line note, looking half the words up in a dictionary, crumpling misspelled notes into balls and starting from scratch – as if I were writing a novel.
And, by the way, the “homework dilemma” doesn’t only apply to the kids’ work.
Many years ago, The Wife had to write a thesis for her master’s degree, and – even though pregnant at the time – managed to do so quite admirably.
Then, figuring I write for a living, she thought it wise to give me the paper to read over and edit.
Which I did, editing out all the academic gobbledygook and thesaurusdriven words, and giving tips on writing in a more breezy fashion.
“Honey,” I said gently, “you want to write simply, so people understand.
No need for words you don’t use in everyday conversation. Just get your point across.”
She took my advice, and when the paper came back we were both shocked. Many of my corrections were crossed out by a red marker, with one accompanied by an exclamation, “Don’t do this again!” And at the end of the paper came the following comments: “Make use of a thesaurus,” and “Isn’t your husband a writer? Maybe consult him.”
Or maybe don’t.


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