Question: Why am I doing my son's homework for him?

And furthermore, why does my son have homework? He’s in Kindergarten.

Sheesh.

Look, I don’t want to be one of those micro-managing overbearing parents who do everything for their kids so that their grown children end up living with them and requiring assistance to do the laundry as adults. Not in the plan.

So I don’t want to get in the habit of doing his homework for him. His homework tonight is his “sharing” for tomorrow.

“Sharing” is this millenium’s version of “show and tell.” But we have to adhere to monthly themes, and this month, they are: President’s Day, Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day.

President’s Day? A kindergartener sharing something about President’s Day? What could a five year old really have to say about this particular holiday? Sure, we can talk about the current president, everybody knows who he is, but I don’t think my son has an inkling about Lincoln or Washington; and I’m not fit to tell him because I was raised on fur traders, prime ministers and the seigneurial system of farming (look it up; you may doze off partway through).

Valentine’s Day, well, it seems kind of pedestrian/predictable to bring in an old valentine. Doesn’t do it for me. Well, I found myself in the position tonight of not having a book with pictures of a damn groundhog, and my son was already in the bath, and so I found the proclamation of Whosiwhatsis Phil (still too lazy/tired to look that up) and printed it out for him and told him that as of next week, he and I are going to do research for his sharing together, i.e. I’m not going to do his homework for him. I don’t want us to slide down that slippery slope where Mama fixes everything and the apron strings start to chafe.

But honestly, why homework in Kindergarten? I was told last night at a teacher meeting I attended that parents are begging for homework for their children. Now I do live at the nexus of uber-hyper-geekdom, so education is obsessed over here like few other places on this continent. But come on.

I don’t believe in homework for kids. Clearly, pushing everything down to the early grades, pressuring students and teachers alike to get better at things quicker isn’t the answer. I taught high school. All that cramming in the early grades? Lost by seventh grade.

Why? Hormones. Life. The fact that teenagers’ brains aren’t fully formed yet. They live in their limbic systems. This explains a lot of their behavior. So even though they crammed like mad for the first six years or more of their school careers, these kids are not going to remember anything once they hit puberty.

So again, I ask, why the homework for the little ones? They won’t remember, they’ll be inundated the rest of their life with assignments and their parents will over-function.

Let’s stop the madness.