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Why are schools fostering an environment where parents do school work?
It started in kindergarten with a blank notebook and a worksheet of words to be cut out. The instructions were simple, parents were to help their child cut out the words, sort them, and glue them to a blank page in the notebook.
Seemed easy enough.
Except…many of the kids, mine included, couldn’t read the second week of school which meant I ended up doing most of the work. Over the course of the year, more work requiring parent help came home, and I dutifully assisted my son, Tate.
This pattern continued until third grade rolled around. That was the year dioramas and projects started. Teachers sent home complex instructions and serious sounding rubrics. Parents exchanged curious texts inquiring about who our children were going to portray at the living history museum. There were agonizing conversations about the amount of work it required and how the only time mom (it was usually a mom helping) had to work on it was long after bedtime.
It became clear my friends were burnt out on third grade homework — work that was supposed to be done by the child because if it wasn’t, who was the teacher actually grading?
At one point, I looked at my son and said, “I’ve already done third grade. This is on you.”…
