That Panic Last Night

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If your family is anything like ours — and most other happy-enough humans — you spent the last two months in a joyous haze of sun, fun, splashing, and laughing. And you spent last night tearing your hair out in Post It-size chunks while your children threw themselves on the floor, bawling and breaking their brand new pencils in half.

Summer homework is due. Today.

Today is Day One for 1.1 million New York City public school children. The rest of New York’s school children are matriculating right around now, too, and it seems that most of them — public and private — were asked to do something school-related over the summer. The question is: Did they do it?

The answer, albeit Clintonian, is: That depends on what the word “they” means.

Did “they” do it if mom sat next to them till 3 a.m. last night, doing the typing to save time? What if she read them “A Tale of Two Cities” out loud? What if dad rented the DVD and suggested topic sentences?

In our house, we certainly intended to have our kids do their work in a timely fashion. As August rolled around, the vague notion of something important we were supposed to do — they were supposed to do — started rising like a harvest moon. But you know what?

A harvest moon turns out to be surprisingly easy to ignore when the choice is, “Homework or toasting marshmallows?” “Homework or let them play another half-hour of kick ball?” Okay, even, “Homework or — hey, “The Simpsons” are on,” worked. “Homework or a shower?” was the best — it’s how we occasionally got them de-funkified.

The brilliant idea of having the moppets do “a little bit every day” so it wouldn’t be a “burden,” and yet they wouldn’t “lose the gains they made in the academic year” had about as much impact in our household as the brilliant idea of having them start raising organic alpacas and selling the wool for college tuition. Lovely in theory, but — hey, “The Simpsons” are on.

All of which means we have sabotaged our children’s education, according to a lot of folks in the field.

“Skills drop over the summer,” the principal of Ezra Academy in Queens, Fran Hirschman, said. “Math, Spanish — it’s amazing how much kids lose over the summer, and it takes at least a month or two to bring them back, not even to the level where we had been in June, but maybe to two month before that.” That’s why she doesn’t feel one proper fraction of guilt assigning homework to be parsed out through the summer.

And of course, if kids really did do their homework in regular dollops all summer long, I’m sure it would behoove all involved. But everyone I know was doing it at the last minute.

“I really have to start paying attention,” my friend Marla said last week as she hunted for her daughters’ assignments. My cousin and her son got three hours of sleep the night before their school in Chicago began. My sister was shocked to find that the eight questions her high school junior had put off turned out each to have eight sub-sections each — a,b,c,d,e,f,g and h — and “h” was always, “Write a definition of all the adjectives you just used.” No sleep for them.

But at least they weren’t over at my friend Carol’s apartment. It took quite a while before Carol’s daughter started cutting out pictures for her summer book report collage.

On Anne Frank.

Does this make sense? I believe in teaching Holocaust history. But with homework most every night during the school year, does an Anne Frank/complex fractions/Spanish verb summer of homework make sense? Isn’t it time to take a real break? To celebrate being a kid and not just a student?

“We boycott summer homework,” the director of education at Brain Boosters Workshops, Kirk Martin, said. “We recommend children spend summer exploring their gifts and passions, learning new skills unrelated to school and just enjoying stress-free months or downtime that they don’t get throughout the school year.”

Those are the stress-free months us parents don’t get throughout the school year either, which is why the stomach feels such distress when it is time to start the whole cycle again. And so, teaching our kids perhaps the worst academic lesson of all, we pull a first night all-nighter. On the other hand, it’s amazing how much of “A Tale of Two Cities” you can absorb when the clock is ticking, the DVD is blaring, dad’s gluing and mom’s typing. It’s also very easy to give an example of, say, “The worst of times.”

We may all have forgotten buckets of what we learned last year, but we remember this one: Homework stinks.

Hope you got yours in on time. (I also hope the teacher doesn’t turn around and toss it all out.)

lskenazy@yahoo.com


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