Homework, Deja Vu

Today when I was babysitting for the grandkids, my grandson was doing his homework.  He's in the first grade.  He seemed to be having a good time filling in the missing letters to make words and then draw a picture of the object to prove that he understood what he had written.  On occasion he asked an older sister if a specific word had one of two similar sounding letters.

Then he seemed stuck, saying he couldn't do one of them.  So I asked to take a look and I saw that he was doing it incorrectly. The workbook exercise he was doing was actually much, much simpler.  All he had to do was to fill in the letter they gave per line, then read and understand what the word was and draw a picture to prove it.

When his mother was a year older than he is, she failed an entire section of an IQ Test for making a similar mistake.  She was supposed to complete a word with the missing letters and then draw a picture to prove she knew what she had written.  She invented objects that combined two words.  The educational psychologist who explained the results to me gave me examples, which were brilliantly creative.  But no points were given for that entire section, and she didn't get into the gifted program.

Watching my grandson quickly do his homework once he didn't have to struggle and wasn't challenged at all gave me some clues as to why I always hated doing homework as a kid.