Yes yes yes. I know I spelled dumber wrong but that is how I am starting to feel when the kids come home from school. Mia comes home with homework every day from her first grade class. While I am impressed with how well she is advancing, I am seeing that not only does she have homework but so do I! I thought I had left this all behind after I graduated from college.
I now have on average about an hour of homework that needs to be done everyday. Oh gee, can I please do YOUR homework? Who would have thought you would have homework in 1st Grade? Mrs. Tazzioli was a saint in my eyes because I never had to take work home. I had no math. I had no reading and I certainly did not have spelling!
Now here is where things get ugly. I thought I could single handedly change how Mia was doing her homework. I first decided to focus on her math problems. This stuff is easy I would tell her. The math you are doing has an answer. , 14-5=9 and 12+12=24 right? MMMM….Not anymore it doesn’t! She tells me that you need to show how that it works. Oh shit. That is easy. Take the first number put it on top and cross a few numbers and take this one away from over her and WHAM your answer. OH NO…Not so easy. Now everything is these damn number boxes or lines. So with 12+12 is now 10+2+10+2 which then equals 20+4 which then equals 24. That to me seems like a shit ton of work. Not a problem because I can adapt. Well let’s just say that I did not adapt enough. It turns out that I was giving bad instruction on some of her homework. EEEEKKKKK…Well that could not be, I have been through advanced Calculus and Physics….Ah well, I gave in and asked that Mrs. Wisted send home Mia’s math workbook every day so I can “learn” math…It just never ends.
Then comes reading. Oh joy. It only seems like yesterday that I was reading books to her. Now she reads the books for me in the first grade. When I was in first grade, I read novels like “Tad (dog) sees Jill” and “Jill hears Fred”. I have to say that I am impressed with how far she has gotten in her first two years at Reilly. Mrs. Wisted does a great job with the kids and rewards them when they achieve goals. Mia tells me about all the things that she gets….I’m jealous because I want some of those things (candy, stuffed animals, etc.). It reminds me of some of the stuff that you get from Chuckie Cheese but these little trinkets sure get her motivated to read the books from her class, as well as, extra books called AR (I think Advanced Reading). She now reads 1-2 books per day at home and her vocabulary is increasing so quickly.
Ah and then there is spelling. I think in 1st grade I was tackling the very difficult words like dog, cat, rat, frog. Oh there is no messing around in spelling either. While there are some easy words (by, ), Mrs. Wisted goes all gangster on Mia’s spelling words with things like Incubator, Oviparous and Embryology. Yeah, now I’m feeling really dumb. 1st grade and she knows these words? While I went ahead and looked them up, I definitely did not know how to spell them or know their meaning before the sheet came home! So how did she do on her spelling words?? She got 100% which translates into 3 pieces of candy. She definitely puts in the hard work to get those scores but it impresses me with how she gets the words that this Fire Dad was lost on.
While I am not against the kids getting homework, I fear the day when all three have homework together. If we factor in an hour for each girl, I will be doing late night study sessions with them. We will all be sitting around drinking Jolt Cola, taking No Doze and listening to Gangster Rap until midnight!