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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
From the time I was very young, school was my thing. Not only was I a good student, but I was good at being<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/i> her thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Read More Model Student<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}