Kindergarten Homework

Kindergarten Homework

Before I was a mom, I was a teacher, so I always prided myself on the idea that someday, when I had kids, they would be good students. Of course I was a teacher in the days before Kindergarten homework, so I am starting to wonder if I really have to hold myself to my early teacher ideals.

I was pretty shocked when I sent my baby off to school and he came home with kindergarten homework. I am not talking about easy kindergarten homework either. I am talking about kindergarten homework that practically required a scientific calculator. My husband and I spent the whole first night of our son’s first day of school trying to assemble a family tree for him to share the next morning. By the time it was finished being pasted and painted, we didn’t have the energy to scrub down the table and vacuum up all the scraps of paper and glitter that littered our dining room floor.

If I thought that first bit of kindergarten homework was bad, I really shuddered the next week when his assignment was to learn about fractions by helping me with dinner. The teacher also specified that we were not to cheat and order pizza.

So we measured, we stirred, we spilled and I longed for the days when kindergarten homework only involved a few crayons or maybe a little paste. As we mixed up a pie crust and my son spilled flour all over the floor I wondered if his teacher understood who really did the “work” in kindergarten homework assignments.

I finally lost it the third week of school when the kindergarten homework assignment forced us to make a volcano that erupted all over my kitchen counter, floors and ceiling. I stood there in the kitchen as bits of red foam dripped from the ceiling fan onto my head. I wanted to meet the teacher that dared to assign kindergarten homework.

The next day I marched into her classroom and asked her if I could see her lesson plan for the day. Just as I suspected it was pretty tame. No glue pots necessary. Not even a pair of scissors. There were a few mentions of a phonics review, but I couldn’t picture her classroom floor getting sticky reviewing phonics. She didn’t even have the kindergarten standards like finger painting planned. That’s when the idea hit me. Oh, I know it was cruel, but for some reason I couldn’t help myself. I decided then and there that if Ms. Sheldon didn’t stop with her kindergarten homework from Hell, she was getting a class hamster for Christmas.