Naptime Blog

I spent years and years in school.  After high school, I got my bachelors degree.  Three years ago, completed my masters degree.  I did my fair share of school work, homework, projects, papers, and studying.  I enjoyed school, and worked my butt off to end my educational career with a 3.75 GPA.  So why am I doing homework again?

My daughter is in the second grade.  She is now learning her times tables, geometry, interesting scientific phenomena, and she is reading at a level much higher than that of a second grader.  It upsets me very much that she says she does not like school.  When I was her age I loved school.  Regardless, my little girl does not do much studying, loses her attention span quite easily when doing homework after school, admits she does not like school, and when I test her before a test she drives me crazy with the ridiculous answers she gives me, but yet she holds a 96-98 average with every report card and ranks in the top 10 percentile with every standardized test.   I guess I should not complain, but I just wish she enjoyed school. 

Every day Juliana comes home with homework, and every few weeks she gets a project assigned.  As her mother, I check her homework nightly and help her with her projects.  Since Juliana’s homework started getting trickier within the past few months, I have truly begun to feel like my mother.  My mind is always running a million thoughts a minute, and until I mastered the art of penmanship, I could not keep up with my thoughts on paper, and my mother would yell at me regularly that my homework was sloppy.  She would make me do it over and over again until it was to her liking.  I distinctly remember writing in those marble notebooks, and if my mom was that unhappy with my rushed penmanship, she would rip out the page and have me start again.  But then, later on in school, the opposite side of that ripped out page would fall out of the marble notebook because my mom tore out its other half!  It is memories like this that I am reminded of every time Juliana hastily writes up her homework, with illegible words or ridiculous misspellings of things I am certain she knows how to spell.  I will not tear out the page, although, believe me, I have been tempted.  And so I sit there with her correcting her far out sentences and having her change words that I think would be better another way…  And then it hits me…  I already finished my years and years of school.  It is now Juliana’s turn.

My daughter is a very bright girl with excellent grades and a wonderful imagination.  Although in many ways she is like me, Juliana needs to do her own homework.  I will undoubtedly be there to check her homework and guide her in the right direction, but for now, I need to let her be herself!

Jennifer
Wife to Paul, Mom to Juliana (7), Anthony and Louis (1) and Joseph (4 months)www.nevaland.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 3:01 am and is filed under Jennifer, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.