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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Homework is gonna kill me

I now understand the complete torture that is encouraging one's child to do her homework when she is clearly not.in.the.mood.  However, we had Girl Scouts tonight, so her homework had to get done.  

The homework assignment was pretty difficult--N had to use her spelling words to write a poem or story.  Now this may sound easy, but it really takes a considerable amount of imagination because you have to connect completely unrelated words in a coherent and mostly sensible series of paragraphs. This is an assignment I had my 6th graders do (which either means I was a completely awful, way-too-easy teacher or this is truly a difficult assignment for 2nd graders).  

Her words were 
Boys
Girls
Exaggerate
Foxes
Wolves
Happily
Babies
Glasses
Eggs
Sneakers
Adorable
Patches
Quizzes

Now I don't know if N's issue tonight was 1. she wasn't in the mood for homework, 2. she was frustrated by the assignment, or 3. a combination of both.  Or it could have been 4. being tired/getting sick/needing to poop, which are catch-all reasons for why kids often act like shitheads.  

I tried to help her by writing up an example for her, but I told her she could not use any of my sentences. It was just to help give her an idea of how she would write it.  I also gave her some suggestions of general topics she could write about that would include many of the aforementioned words.  For example, I said she could write about a forest or a zoo.

She chose quizzes as her topic and then proceeded to act like a turd because it was understandably hard to connect many of these words to the topic of quizzes.  

Bear in mind, while I was dealing with Miss Moodiness, I was also contending with the noise and mayhem of General Disarray and Captain Chaos who will not give us a minutes peace while I try to work on homework with N.  

She managed to write up a really good paragraph but at the expense of every strand of my nerves.  

Boys and girls take quizzes.  Some are about animals like foxes and wolves.  Children happily write down their answers.  Babies aren't allowdd in classrooms because they mess up stuff.  Some quizzes are about bird's eggs and they refer to science.  Some people have to wear glasses to help them learn.  Maybe somebody wears adorable and lucky sneakers to help them with the quiz.  People exaggerate when taking a reading quiz.  Some teachers give out patches for doing good and accurate word on their quizzes.  

After she wrote the sentence about "they refer to science," she asked, "What does refer mean?"  I told her she probably shouldn't use it if she doesn't know its meaning.  But she pressed me for what it means, and when I told her she decided she would still use it.  

3 comments:

Fuller/Goodfriend said...

That's an awesome paragraph. I have middle school students who cannot write like that. Nice work!

Kelsey said...

She did a great job! Do all the kids have the same list? Some of those seem like difficult words for second grade.

Keri said...

Great paragraph!