Starting from as early as Grade 1, kids are given homework to complete on a daily or weekly basis. The concept behind homework is to practice the skills taught in class and thus prepare the student for upcoming tests, in which case the teacher may not offer their help. As your child grows older and they progress through the grades, the work becomes tougher and the time period to complete said work becomes shorter.

School administration is often advised to limit the length of daily homework depending on the grade. In Grade 1, homework should take no longer than 10 minutes, and then increase in 10-minute increments throughout every subsequent grade. Theoretically, this means it should take approximately 2 hours to complete homework assigned in Grade 12, however, this is not the case. The school administration bases their assumptions on averages. The problem is that there are outliers within all data. If a piece of homework is averaged to take 2 hours, they’re not taking into consideration the students who will finish it in 30 minutes, or the ones that will take 4 hours to complete the work.

Few of us are born as geniuses. It takes us years to grow and expand our intelligence. With that said, you need to realize that teachers alone cannot intellectualize our kids. As parents, you might often be preoccupied with your job and housework, but whether you agree with it or not, you play a major role in the development of your child’s education.

When I was in Grade 1, my dad would often take me aside for an hour or two each day and teach me cursive writing, mathematics and spelling. I learned how to add, subtract, multiply and use long division from his teachings. I even learned how to solve fractions and work out cross-multiplication. I knew the concept of negative numbers long before my classmates, and I was even annoyed when my Grade 5 teacher named Mrs. Macphee informed the class that negative numbers did not exist, just because she did not want to teach them about it.

I was so far advanced in my knowledge of mathematics that up until Grade 9, I easily attained a 97% average in my math classes. Of course, at that point, it became harder. My dad’s knowledge was limited and thus my final mark dropped to an 82% in Grade 9 and a 78% in Grade 10, before I skyrocketed back up to a 97% in Grade 11 and a 95% in Grade 12. But all of this was thanks to my dad, who chose to stay at home with me and not work at a job for 12 years, just so I could excel at getting an education.

This is the main problem with regards to families these days.  Granted, bills need to be paid, you need to put food on the table, and you need to keep a roof over your heads. But keep in mind that your kids will learn much more from you than from any teacher, as I did from my dad. If you don’t help your children with their homework, they’ll get frustrated and often just quit. Their grades will suffer and only you will be to blame for it. And that doesn’t mean you should just give them the answers either – it means you need to take to time to explain to them HOW to get the answers.

It’s most common for kids to struggle in the mathematics and science department, as those are some of the toughest subjects in school. I myself never took physics, though I did learn some of what was involved in my Grade 10 Academic Science class. Needless to say, I still cannot figure out annoying questions such as, “If Train A is traveling at this speed in this direction and Train B is traveling at that speed in the opposite direction, when will the two trains meet?” Obviously this involves creating a formula and then substituting numbers into said formula. Of course, physics is one of the hardest courses to take, and it’s only available on the “Academic” level – there’s no “Applied” version. That was one reason I didn’t take the course; the other two reasons being that I wasn’t interested in physics and that I had previously known some relatively intelligent friends who had barely passed the course with a 67% average.

As a parent, you may not know the answer to every single question your child gets on their homework sheet, but it’s your responsibility to help teach what you do know. If your son or daughter has a science project, help them build it. If they need to study for a test, help them memorize information. Take every opportunity you have to ensure your child succeeds in achieving an education.

Most importantly, remember that we are all different in nature, and as such, we all learn in our own unique ways. A teacher may explain how to solve a math problem a certain way, but your child may not understand it. I often solved math problems in different ways other than what the teacher taught me. I’d always come up with the correct answer, but I could never solve the equation using the teacher’s method, because their version seemed overly complicated to me. Often, I’d help my classmates solve a problem, and at the end of it, they would tell me that they understood it better when I explained it, than when the teacher explained it. No wonder why everyone always told me that I should become a teacher.

Play an active role in your child’s education and it’ll pay off in the long-run. After all, it certainly beats the expenses of hiring a tutor. As for me, unlike other kids who’ve thrown out all of their papers each year, I’ve kept all of my schoolwork in boxes in my basement. That way, when I have kids in the future, and I’ve forgotten how to write essays or complete math equations, they’ll be able to look off of my notes and homework from when I was in high school.

Geez. As I write this, I still can’t believe I’m already 18.

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