Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (13 page)

Six-year-old Katie Williams of Maryland spent days trolling newspapers looking for “io” and “ou” configurations in order to begin her “Rainbow Words” assignment. “Do you know how many thousands of words we had to read to come up with enough to satisfy that assignment?” asks her mother. Once she found the words, Katie had to write each one over and over again, using every color
of the rainbow. Get it? Rainbow words. Whatever happened to using a No. 2 pencil?

Another mother described the weekly timed math tests mandated by her kids’ teacher. “Sixty problems correctly answered in four minutes. We parents are supposed to stand over our kids with stopwatches. My children are very different from each other, but they have this in common—they have both been in tears due to their fear of failing these inane tests. Mind you, these children are seven years old.”

But my favorite is Carlie Williams’s nephew. Assigned to construct a relief map of one of the fifty states out of plaster of Paris, the boy chose Nebraska. He made a flat rectangle. As his aunt said, “You’ve got to love a kid who puts into the assignment exactly the effort it’s worth.”

How would we be spending our time if we didn’t have to slave over these piles of mind-numbing make-work? Maybe some kids would be vegging out in front of the television or exercising their thumbs on their Game Boys, but I would guess that’s not what would be going on in my house, or in most others. Instead, we’d do the things we rarely have time for during the week, like go for bike rides or shoot hoops. My kids might even occasionally enjoy the opportunity to be bored. You remember boredom, don’t you? That state where the imagination is forced to take over and create entertainment?

Harris M. Cooper, formerly the director of the Program in Education at Duke University and author of
The Battle over Home work: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents
, tells me that the homework load for most students has actually remained steady for the past fifty years, except for the group in which I did my very unscientific survey—middle- to upper-middle-class students
in the lowest grades. Cooper says that because educators of middle and upper-class children feel a great deal of pressure to maintain test scores, they up the homework ante.

I also learned from Professor Cooper—a.k.a. the homework guru—that there is
no
correlation between how much homework young children do and how well they comprehend material or perform on tests. Why? For a number of reasons. First, because their attention spans are just too short—they can’t tune out external stimuli to focus on material. Second, younger children cannot tell the difference between the hard stuff and the easy stuff. They’ll spend fifteen minutes beating their heads against a difficult problem, and leave themselves no time to copy their spelling words. Finally, young children do not know how to self-test. They haven’t the faintest idea when they’re making mistakes, so in the end they don’t actually learn the correct answers. It isn’t until middle school and high school that the relationship between homework and school achievement becomes apparent.

So why the hell did Zeke and I have to spend every afternoon of third grade gnashing our teeth over the communicative and associative properties of numbers when we could be playing catch?

The reasons, Cooper says, extend beyond Zeke’s achievement in that particular grade. Apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I’m not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.) When younger kids are given homework, Cooper says, it can also help them understand that all environments are learning ones, not just the classroom. For example, by helping calculate the cost of items on a trip to the grocery store, they can
learn about math. The problem is, none of my children’s assignments have this real-world, enjoyable feel to them. My children have never been assigned Cooper’s favorite reading task—the back of the Rice Krispies box. Instead, we’re up all night weaving hemp.

The final, and perhaps most important, reason to assign homework to young children, says Cooper, is to help them develop study habits and time-management skills that they’ll need to succeed later in their academic careers. If you wait until middle school to teach them these skills, they’ll be behind. I suppose this makes sense. Spending their afternoons slaving over trigonometry and physics will come as no surprise to my kids. By the time they’re in high school, they won’t even remember what it’s like to spend an idle afternoon.

According to Cooper, all three of these rationales are based on the idea of keeping homework simple and short, and gradually building on its amount and complexity. The guideline educators typically use is the ten-minute rule. Children should be assigned ten minutes of homework per grade per night, starting in first grade. So how about kindergarten? Well, Cooper’s a circumspect kind of guy, so he wouldn’t condemn it outright, but he did say this: “At this age, kids should not be expected to do much on their own.”

And what about those long-term homework projects that involve a lot of “integration of skills”—that favorite phrase I’ve heard again and again in all my children’s classrooms? When used in younger grades, the lesson those projects often teach is, “When the going gets tough, Mom gets going,” says Cooper. “Complex projects should probably not happen in the lower grades, and when they do, there should be clear expectations about parental
involvement.” Amen to that, I say, because otherwise the only skills being integrated are those of procrastination and panic, and those are plenty finely honed around our house by now.

Take heart, parents, and bring the quotations from the homework guru to your children’s teachers. I did. When I e-mailed Zeke’s third-grade teacher to say he was too loaded down with busywork, she agreed and said he shouldn’t do more than half an hour of homework every night. She instructed me to draw a line at the bottom of the page once we’ve both had enough, no matter where he was on the assignment.

On the first day of the new regimen, after soccer practice, we set out his homework on the kitchen table. A page of spelling, two of math, a sheet of cursive. We got through the math okay, with me trying to hide the fact that I had to count on my fingers to check his work. He labored over the cursive, making rows of perfect
u
’s and
w
’s, the tips of his fingers white on the pencil, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Then it was on to spelling. We made it almost to the end of the page, to the paragraph full of errors to correct. He made his proofreading marks, and as he got ready to copy out the corrected paragraph, I looked up at the clock. It had been forty minutes.

“That’s enough, buddy,” I said. “You did a great job.” And I drew a line.

A
few years ago, Sophie and Zeke came home from school abuzz over the new game they’d learned in gym class. I’d never heard them express any kind of excitement about PE before—they are not natural athletes—but there they were strategizing and recounting the high points of their respective matches with unprecedented zeal. I tried to follow the discussion, but it was making little sense to me. My one foray into organized sports was a single spring on the Brookwell Cleaners softball team in sixth grade. I remember very little about the season other than the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head in a futile attempt to distract the gnats from my face, the sound of my own teammates’ jeers as I made my regular strikeout, and the euphoria of being allowed to take the bench whenever our team had the slightest chance of winning.

The game my kids were so agog over wasn’t softball, though. It wasn’t even foursquare, a game they’d once tried to explain to me without much success. Finally, I asked them what they were talking about.

“Dodgeball!” Zeke, then seven years old, announced gleefully. “It’s really fun.”

Dodgeball? My children were playing
dodgeball
? That cruel, brutal, violent school-yard game so mercilessly satirized in the 2004 film with Ben Stiller? The game, more importantly, that exemplified
everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed blond athletes, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country-club swim teams? Dodgeball? Over my dead body.

I know it’s fashionable to claim to have been a nerd as a child, to insist on having scrabbled to hold on to the lowest tier of the social ladder, to recount years of torture at the hands of the golden and anointed. Trust me, I know just how trite my history of exclusion is. I know that when compared with a lifetime of true deprivation and abuse, suburban misery counts for little. Nonetheless, as someone who still, at forty-three, gets a clutch of nausea every time she drives by George Washington Junior High School, I am just not willing to let go of the reins of this particular hobbyhorse. I am convinced that my entire personality was formed in those long tile hallways where I was a victim of that most banal of childhood torments—ostracism. Everything can be explained by, every torque and twist in my character can be attributed to, those grim, lonely years. Neither the jocks, nor the heads, nor even the brains wanted any part of me. They talked
about
me, but they didn’t talk
to
me, or even look at me, and if it weren’t for the series of successively more hostile prank phone calls that I received, I could have happily deluded myself into thinking that none of them knew I existed.

Gym class, however, was where they allowed themselves to express their disdain. In gym class for some reason they were allowed to heap derision on the apraxic kids. (“No batter, no batter. Easy out.”) Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values.
Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.

And dodgeball. God, dodgeball. As my own children were planning their tactics, evaluating which kids would be easily taken out by a hail of red balls (considerations included general athletic ability, low versus high center of gravity, established cowardice in the face of hard throws), I was rocketed back to those dreaded days on the blacktop at GW Junior High. I remember quaking under the gaze of a huge blond girl who even then I knew was destined to consider eighth grade as the apogee of her life. She smiles, heaves back her strong arm, and whales the ball. Before it even begins its arc through the air, I’m on the ground, quivering, arms over my head, already crying, even though I haven’t been hit yet.

“I’m calling your gym teacher,” I announced.

My children stared at me, mouths agape.

“What are you talking about?” Sophie said.

“You can’t play dodgeball. It’s cruel.”

“It is not,” wailed my son.

“Yes it is,” I said. “It’s mean! It’s mean to pick on a kid because she’s weak, because she can’t catch a ball, or duck, or run fast enough.”

The children looked at each other and then at me. Clearly, the more barbaric aspects of the game had not even penetrated their consciousness.

“Mom,” my daughter said. “Please, Mom. Do not call our gym teacher. Please.”

But it was too late. I was already marshaling my facts. The National Association for Sport & Physical Education had issued a position paper on dodgeball, and they didn’t like it any more than I do. Dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K–12 school physical education programs, said NASPE. A game that targets
and eliminates weaker kids does not help them develop confidence. While it may allow for the practice of some physical skills, there are many other activities that do this better, without using human targets. Furthermore, the only children who like dodgeball are the ones who don’t get hit, who don’t get eliminated, who don’t get whaled on. Like, for some reason, my children.

I prepared for my conversation with my children’s gym teacher by learning by heart the following statement from NASPE: “It is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others.” Then I made the call. At the time, my children went to a school where community service was an actual part of the curriculum. It made no sense for dodgeball to exist there. This was a school where conflict resolution was taken so seriously that when some neighborhood toughs threw eggs at the fourth graders, the head of the lower school brought them in for a mediated encounter session. This was a school that took very seriously the theories of Vivian Gussin Paley, author of the marvelous book on childhood social ostracism
You Can’t Say You Can’t Play
. I chose this school precisely because it was the polar opposite of GW Junior High. The gym teacher and the head of the lower school called me back, not a little confused, especially when I explained that while my children were enjoying themselves tremendously playing dodgeball, and that I didn’t actually know of any kids who weren’t, I still thought they should ban the game.

It was only while I was earnestly describing to the head of the lower school how detrimental dodgeball was to our children’s developing bodies and minds, through the prism, I might add, of my experience huddling with my hands over my eleven-year-old head while dozens of balls rained down on me, that I realized that what I was really trying to do was exorcise the ghosts of my own unhappy childhood. I was stirring up trouble at my children’s school
because thirty years ago I was miserable, and I had decided dodgeball was the very matrix of that misery, in which all the lines of force that were conspiring to crush my spirit were laid bare.

The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn’t do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl’s mother. I know just how to provide the proper sympathy, exactly what to say when the boys call out, “Hey, carpenter’s dream!” (flat as a board, and easy to screw), or when she finds a Web site dedicated to humiliating her. My mother, as supportive and loving as she is, was always left somewhat befuddled and at a loss by my sufferings. “But I always had so many friends when I was a girl!” she used to say. Now that it’s my turn to be the mom, maybe I overcompensate. I regale my children with the tale of how I used to eat my lunch huddled over a book in a corner of the school library because the other kids wouldn’t let me sit at their lunch tables. I comfort them with stories about geeks and nerds who went on to conquer the world.