Is Busy Work the Price to Pay for Good Grades?

Even if busy work is the price to pay for good grades, is it worth paying?

A lot of the homework coming home these days seems to be busy work. I have a child who HATES busy work. He has always dragged his feet doing homework, dawdling for hours over what in my mind could have been accomplished in 20 minutes, and I have never understood why he had to make it so painful rather than just getting it done. But more and more, I am beginning to wonder if maybe there is another side to it. Maybe he has never understood why I insisted on him doing it in the first place?  A little story he told me recently, to illustrate this point:

“I remember when I was in preschool. I hated preschool. I don’t remember much of it, but some things are still vividly in my mind. For instance, I remember how one day the teacher handed out papers with apple outlines, a worm poking out of the apple. She told us to color in the apples, and I was thinking to myself how NOT fun that sounded. Why in the world would I want to color an apple that someone else already drew? All you can do is color them red, then maybe a blue worm with green eyes, and you’re done. It is SO boring! And then, she said that those kids who were done with their apple early could take another one of those sheets and color that in as well. THAT was the clincher for me – why any kid would want to do it again, when it was stupid the first time, was beyond me. But yet, most kids happily got incredibly busy coloring. So I colored mine too, but I was sure to be very slow so as not to have to do another one.”

Incidentally, this same teacher advised us to keep him in preschool for another year as he did not seem ready to move on. He is now 13, in 8th grade, in a gifted program, and taking high school math. Clearly, in hindsight, coloring apples at age 4, when he had been drawing elaborate trains since age 1, seems indeed like a rather stupid activity and the epitome of busy work. It also seems perfectly understandable if he had refused coloring altogether and pursued his own interests at his own pace. With the benefit of hindsight, I am a very understanding parent who recognizes my child’s abilities and knows when to step outside the conventions of school when they are restrictive and make no sense.

Fast-forward 9 years, and here we are in 8th grade, with math homework that is left undone, reflected in a B- average. Mind you, that is actually very rosy after our 7th grade rollercoaster ride that covered everything from As to Fs. But still, I cannot let it go. Just a couple of late homework assignments turned in, and it will be back to an A, the teacher assures me. She also tells me that he did very well on the unit test and clearly understands the topic, and that the missing homework was assigned to prepare for that very test. You would think, being such an understanding mother, that I respected his choice of ignoring the homework. But not so. I will come right out and admit that I hounded him all weekend – it was a long, 4-day weekend at that, perfect in my eyes for doing plenty of catch-up work – about the missing homework: This would be a good time to start, when will you do it, you have one more day to do it, don’t start it at 9:00 on Sunday night, if you don’t have it done by Sunday night you will not watch the baseball playoffs! He blissfully ignored all my nagging and cheerily sat down precisely at 9:00 on Sunday night to begin his OTHER, new math homework, ignoring the old. I know, you are laughing by now, and even I am laughing, because it serves me right. He made his choice, which in my heart I admit is the better one. But only because he decided to go against my demands and used his own judgment. Shouldn’t I applaud such thinking? Yet I consistently encourage my children to jump through hoops for the sake of conformity, because I cannot tear myself away from the belief that this is what gets you ahead. I shroud this in luring arguments, like “hard work is good” or “we all sometimes have to do stupid work, it’s part of life” or “you have to show me now that you can dig in and get good grades because later they will really count”. But in the end, I will probably know, another 9 years from now, with the benefit of hindsight, that micromanaging his homework and grades at age 13 was completely unnecessary and counterproductive.

I am now humbly rereading my own blog entry: “This Mom Managed not to Nag One Whole Day!” and practicing the art of tongue-biting.