When I was a kid I loved school. LOVED it. On the last day of first grade, when the rest of the kids in town were rejoicing, I cried in the car on the way home. And when I say “cried,” I don’t mean just a few tears; I mean great, wracking sobs. I was inconsolable at the thought of not going to school for three long months.
I got a small measure of comfort from the ream or so of worksheets that my teacher–my beloved Mrs. Fowlds–had given me to tide me over, but it just wasn’t the same. I tried to recreate the magic of the classroom by setting up makeshift desks in my bedroom and engaging my two younger brothers–then aged three and five–as my pupils. I assigned them reading homework and made them complete math worksheets, meting out corporal punishment when their work wasn’t up to my rigorous standards (it was this last that put an end to my school; my brothers appealed their punishment to a higher authority–Mom).
From the time I was very young, school was my thing. Not only was I a good student, but I was good at being a student. Homework and tests and term papers and regular evaluation suit me well. I could quite happily make a career of being a student, and I may do it yet, if that whole “novel-in-progress” thing doesn’t work out.
I was unprepared, then, for a kid like Lydia. She loves the social and artsy-craftsy parts of school, but just tolerates, at best, most of the academic stuff. Her weekly homework consists of a few pages of reading, one or two short pages of math, and ten spelling words. She has from Monday to Friday to do this little bit of work, but every week it’s the same old thing: begging, pleading, cajoling, threatening, anger, recriminations, and so on. And that’s just from my side.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to get her to do her homework willingly. Neither rewards nor punishments nor the humiliation of going to school without her homework done will push her to just sit down and do the work. Some nights she will spend an hour or more protesting vehemently against an assignment that would take her no more than fifteen minutes to complete. It’s driving me crazy.
She’s plenty smart and I have no concerns about her ability to get the work done. It’s just that school is emphatically not her thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to change that.
Just wanted to say I feel your pain. Sometimes Patrick will do his homework like he’s on fire. Other days it seems like he wouldn’t finish a single page even if you were pulling fingernails out one at a time until he completed it.
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Have you tried the whole “natural consequences” thing? As in, let her skip doing the homework and then get bad grades as a consequence, and see if she realizes it’s a problem? Of course, if she doesn’t mind getting bad grades, this clearly wouldn’t work. 😉
As it happens, kids in Sweden don’t get grades until 7th or 8th grade, so that plan won’t work for a few years yet. I don’t know what the answer is, really, but I hope I figure it out soon!
As a child, we always had to complete our homework upon arrival at home – before anything else could be done. It was done as fast as humanly possibly, but it was done.
(*take this with a grain of salt*) As a teacher I would have to ask, what is the purpose of the homework? Does Lydia understand that purpose? Is the homework interesting? Some kids love the finality of worksheets, others find them mind numblingly boring and would rather impale themselves on a large sharp object. Can you combine her love of arts and crafts/fun with the homework? For example, creating flash cards with pictures for the spelling words or jazzing them up with glitter? Making up songs? Make up a math game – have Lydia design and create it, then teach the family to play?