Too Much Homework!

It used to be easy to help my boys with homework. Up until about fifth grade. Now I have a sixth and seventh grader and it's not so easy anymore.

With all due respect for teachers, parents have enough to do. Aside from the fact that we already put in our time at school and did our share of homework, now even if we want to help our tweens and teens....we don't always know how do do that, what with the 'new' math and what feels like college-level science, to name just a couple of subjects.

Between holding down a job, juggling dinner, after-school activities, laundry, and all that it takes to generally run a household and family, the ever-looming homework (now on the weekends, too!) is a stress that weighs down many of us.

I see plenty of moms passing around 'secret' web sites that will help YOU help your KIDS do their homework. They are basically cheat sheets so that you can attempt to re-learn everything you have forgotten just to help your exhausted children finish up all their homework in time to get you all to sleep at a decent hour and to keep them from melting down about the consequences of NOT completing their homework...which frequently includes losing credit and risking grades falling due to missed assignments.

There seems to be little room for error, too. Not handing in a homework assignment by the next morning when it is due results, in the middle school age group in some schools I am quite familiar with, in BIG grade penalties.

I was talking to another mom last night who was so overextended and unable to help her 7th grader with his homework, and living with such fear that he would be punished for not having gotten his homework done, that she actually let him miss the next morning of school and sent him in late only because if this poor kid had showed up on time without his homework, there would have been hell to pay.

This is craziness. And don't even get me started on the projects and homework that take up hours of our precious little weekend time. Weekends, if you ask me, should be spent in FAMILY activities and downtime, that now instead has been invaded by the obscene amount of schoolwork that MUST GET DONE.

Our middle schoolers now have deadlines that rank right up there with corporate America. I don't know about you, but I would like my young boys to have a more balanced life and stay healthy and get more sleep and not have pressure and worries heaped on them at this age. They will have their whole adult lives for that, but for now, I need them present and perhaps even happy...not sick about homework.

And when I have to start reading their textbooks ten times over just to figure out a lesson because they don't understand the homework any better than I do, now you're infringing on MY time and unless the teachers are coming over to make my dinner and clean my house, that's just not right. Keep the learning in school, I say! Don't send it home for ME to deal with!

Okay, done venting. Thoughts?