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I’ve been working on an assignment most nights this past week. When I haven’t been working on it, I’ve been feeling guilty for putting it off, and there’s been this little voice saying, “we need to do the assignment.” It’s not due until Monday, but there has been some stress involved. It was almost finished tonight, but then the computer went into the rainbow spiral of death and I had to restart it. After the restart, a lot of the work had been lost.

That little voice, “we need to do the assignment,”  is not my conscience- that little voice is Millie.

Millie has a 7-10-minute oral presentation on Constellations due on Monday. The presentation has to be prepared entirely at home so there has been no direction or resources from the teacher. We have searched for information on Constellations, read and highlighted, made notes and turned the notes into a talk. Then we typed it up and made palm cards, and now we are working on the accompanying power point presentation. It has been quite a lot of work and because we are a large busy family, we cut a few corners. (By cutting corners I mean I did some of the work for her.)

I haven’t really mind doing it; it’s been nice to hang with Millie. Being an English teacher, teaching note-taking and summarising, researching and oral presentation preparation is well within my skill set. But as we’ve worked on the task, I have been a little concerned for the parents who have English as a second language. How do they help their children? How do the kids get the work done if the parents can’t help them much? And what about the families where both parents have to work long hours? In some families, there’s after-school care, and then showers, dinner and cuddles on the couch.

I’m not a massive fan of homework.