Homework = Terrorism: A Vent

At least in this household it does. Whenever homework time comes around, we simply revert to describing it in Homeland Security terms. Some days we're right up there in the red, but most of the time we're on the same "watch" as the USA in general: elevated. There is significant risk of homework attacks. I would love to just be "guarded", but that's the stage I'm in when I'm sitting at my desk sipping coffee at about 10:30 thinking, hm, I wonder what homework he'll have tonight? We'll never be "low." Eh-vurr.

Dante doesn't just dislike homework. He loathes it with a burning passion. He despises it. He acts as though you're slipping hot needles under his skin while asking him to dance a jig. His reaction is very much that of a person under intense psychological and physical punishment. I've actually seen him roll around in the floor and moan like a wounded hippopotamus when asked to simply do his math problem by hand rather than with a calculator. It would be amusing if it weren't so incredibly frustrating. I'm pretty sure if given the choice to gnaw his own leg off or finish his spelling, he'd chose to lose a limb. If you think this is hyperbole, it's not. I can't possibly describe the psychotic gyrations we go into when homework happens. And homework happens Every. Fucking. Day. He also insists I sit through each and every agonizing minute of it with him. He simply won't do homework with El Hijo, for reasons I don't fully understand. Once, tired of being a combination lion tamer and suicide prevention hotline answerer, I quit on the homework. I'm not doing it anymore, this is fucking ridiculous, you do it with him. Dante then refused to communicate and wadded himself up in a ball. WTF? It's almost like I'm a security blanket. Unfortunately, I'm also the one who has to tell him to take his pencil out of his Afro and write with it. Ten million times in the next 45 minutes or more. I think at this point this ritual has become a habit now, and so he needs me as the straight man Abbott to his Costello, so he can freak out in between math problems.

This is the punishment academics get for being such good students: you give birth to one who hates anything resembling intelligence.

I'm not saying Dante isn't smart. He's very smart. He just thinks school in general is one big whack-off. On top of that, my child does not have a "relaxed" personality. He's very type-A about being physical. He's a body learner--kinesthetic. He's so fucking kinesthetic that if you ask him to stop wanging his pencil against the table at 90 miles an hour, he'll yell, MOM, if you do that I can't THINK!!! SHEWWWWWWWWWWW!, and let's loose one of those pre-teen tornadoes of exasperated air that seem to punctuate all of his sentences now. Like, GOD, Mom. We've been fortunate to get a few teachers who understand what a body learner is like. They essentially distract the snot out of him so he doesn't have enough time to dick around. When we homeschooled, I had to do things like make him do physical spelling. When we had a spelling word, I would make him jump for consonants and squat for vowels while he spelled it out loud, so "vowel" would be "jump, squat, jump, squat, jump." He loved it, but it didn't even phase him. He doesn't fall asleep at night so much as he just passes out.

Can I whine for a minute? Moving him to functional literacy is fucking hard. He is belligerently apathetic about school work. Part of the problem is that I think he's mildly dyslexic. I never was able to get him tested, because they don't test them in this district unless the problem seems severe. No opthamologist here is capable of doing the test anyway. If he has the least little struggle with something, he wants to quit immediately, and getting him to get interested in it again is like trying to beat a dead man's heart into starting again. It didn't help that he had a horrible first year school experience with a racist kindergarten teacher (fuck you, bitch). But the past is the past, and we can't keep blaming current problems on the past. We have to figure out ways to move past that.

He has to have multiple encounters with most material to get it. His spelling is probably the most black & white example of that. If we don't drill him in spelling nearly every night of the week (including Sunday), he fails. He doesn't get a B or a C on the test, he fails it spectacularly. If we drill him, he makes an A. Not a B or a C, an A. If he has a test in something, I end up making a zillion worksheets for him where I have to restate the material, draw diagrams, make true or false statements, etc in order for him to get it. I was bitching the other day that Houghton Mifflin pays people good money to make worksheets, and I've made them all for free. We studied the hell out of his introduction to government in his history class. I made so many practice tests I was ready to become an anarchist. Fuck government. He was the only kid who didn't miss a single question, so it paid off. But Jesus, I expect this to continue through high school. I expect seven more years of this.

Part of the terrorist event that homework has become is the fact that he hates it. But part of it is the fact that I make him learn it. It totally doesn't seem worth the hassle sometimes, but I won't let him use a calculator in math, even if he swears up and down (while rolling in the floor making hippo noises) that the teacher said it was OK. It's not about the worksheet, it's about understanding the concept, I tell him. I don't care about the concept, he says. I know, and I don't care that you don't care, I reply, you have to know it. Why?????? the hippo rejoins. Because you have to be a smart person to have a good life and to be a responsible person, is my best excuse so far. It consolidates what I believe about education. This is usually responded to with a SHEWWWWWWWWWW! I had pretty much decided I was going to rip all my hair out, and at one weak moment during a particularly frustrating math sheet, I said, You know what? I quit. This isn't worth it. You aren't looking at your paper, you don't care, and you're angry no matter what I say, and I'm tired of fighting over something as simple as adding two numbers together. Forget it, just don't turn it in. And that got a NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I care and I want to do it. Argh. What is this game we play? And just for the record, it's not that he doesn't know how to do it--he just gets easily frustrated. I've fished around enough to figure out the difference.

In the meantime, we keep "fishing for math," a math game El Hijo rigged up with a pencil, a piece of string, a magnet on the end for a "fishing pole" and a bunch of flash cards with paper clips on them. Whoever fishes for math and pulls up a card has a certain number of seconds to solve the answer. Whoever has the most number of cards wins. When JP and Batmite! were up for a visit and also played fishing with math for us (sorry guys, what a lame Friday night), he was absolutely ecstatic. You have to trick him into learning.

Another part of the problem, particularly with math, is that I have been deemed by everyone in the household as the Monarch of Math (that's what MoM stands for). I don't fucking know why. I suck at math. I live in dread of the day that Dante comes home with a math problem I can't solve. I've written notes in to the teacher before saying "Totally don't get how you find the answer for number 26." Math is NOT my strong suit. I am an English major. The only reason I know how to tip is because I used to be a waitress. I especially don't know how the hell math is being taught these days. There is some new and bizarre way of teaching kids math that I completely don't get. There have been a few times where I've simply had to teach Dante the way I know how to do something, because I just don't understand what his teacher is doing. Of course that makes him mad. But it's still the same damned answer. Although, surprisingly enough (or not), they've moved on to angles and Dante absolutely kills the angles math sheets. Maybe it's the visual thing combined with physical stuff. He explained some angle thing to me as "See? The ones like this:" and twisted his fingers up into a mishmash of gang signs that made a couple of scalene angles (I think that's what they were). The other day he was asking me about quadrilateral something or others. Hell if I know. He had his bionicle pieces (glorified legos) going "obtuse--acute--obtuse--acute" while yanking them into the correct shapes. Tonight he was blabbing about "tessellations". I had to fucking look it up. Both of them kept asking "Is this it? Is this it??" And I felt like saying: How the fuck should I know?? My most recent academic experiment was writing about Vogue in the late 1800s. There wasn't any fucking tressellaterals or whatever in that!!"

I keep digging on math, but I should be talking about English. For though Dante loathes math, he'd rather stick a rusty fork in his ear than fool with English. It figures. The one thing I could really be good at helping him with he has an unholy hatred for. The boy hates writing. He's skeptical of reading. He must absolutely be tricked into any grammar of any kind. If he had his way, he'd write in fucking hieroglyphics. Some of his writing, in fact, resembles the pictures on the sides of a pyramid. When he wrote an entire page of something relating to dogs and Christmas on his own, completely voluntarily, I nearly shit a brick. He must be tricked into reading with a combination of graphic novels and wrestling magazines. And even then, it's dicey. I brought him back a Luche Libre magazine from Mexico, and it took him a couple of weeks to say, "He-ey, this isn't English!" He was looking at the fucking pictures. When I test him for grammar, I make up elaborate written story paragraphs about the wrestlers he likes and what they do, and then I have him fix the fuck ups I intentionally make in the paragraphs. I write sentences like "Make this a possessive! 'belt of Jeff Hardy'; 'choke slam of the Undertaker'" Etc. The creativity required is taking its toll. Especially having just recovered from a history test, a science test, a spelling test and a round of grades on a report card that shows Dante is getting C's in vocab and reading.

All I want is for him to be literate and a registered voter. At this point, I will consider that a parenting success. I've given up on the thought of him going to college. He told me (proudly) recently, "I was the only one who didn't raise my hand when the teacher asked us whether we wanted to go to college. She asked me why. I told her I was going to the school of hard knocks instead!" Lovely.

Maybe he'll get a basketball scholarship.

-- DV