>When did the Civil War start?
>What’s a dangling participle?
>How do you find the radius of a circle?
Homework may be be good for kids, but it’s bad for parents — what else could make an educated person feel like such an idiot?
KID: Is this answer right?
PARENT: What are you supposed to do?
KID: Find the slope of the line.
PARENT: Um… geometry wasn’t my best subject.
KID: This is algebra.
It’s one thing to forget something you only learned once, a long time ago, like what year World War II started, but it’s another to blank out completely on an entire subject.
(No wonder that nightmare where you find yourself back in school taking a test is so scary — you know for a fact you can’t pass.)
There was a time when parents could conceal their ignorance by telling their kids “Don’t forget to finish your homework!” before disappearing into the other room to watch TV for the rest of the night. But today’s schools send home so many hints and reminders it’s pretty clear they expect parents to not only actively check their kids’ homework, but participate in the doing of it, too.
PARENT: Any homework tonight?
KID: I have to measure the effects of pressure on memory by having you recite as many capitols as you can in under 60 seconds. Ready?
PARENT: I don’t need 60 seconds: Olympia, Washington; Sacramento, California; and I forget the other 48.
KID: Seriously?
PARENT: Geography wasn’t my best subject, either.
It’s not like you can defend yourself by admitting the real reason you’re not smarter than a 5th grader is because you don’t have to be, and that outside a limited number of professions, nobody really needs to know Π, the central theme of Dante’s Inferno, or how to say “Good Morning” in German.
(In Chinese, maybe, with the way the world is going, but definitely not in German.)
That’s worse than telling to a pre-schooler there’s no reason to be good because there’s no Santa Claus.
Leaving two ways to handle the homework knowledge gap: shrug it off and remind yourself that your kids are being graded, not you,* and that part of learning is learning how to do assignments on your own with no help from your parents.
Or hire a tutor.
For yourself.