When homework makes the whole family cry, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s an OLD picture of my younger son and me visiting a one room schoolhouse located at Old World Wisconsin in Eagle, WI. Look how tiny we both were back then!

As my children have become entrenched in the American public school system over the years, I have become increasingly disillusioned with said system as a whole. I often wonder if American school children are being prepared to survive real life in the real world someday, or if they’re just guinea pigs for a failing experiment that some researcher has been paid too much grant money for to admit that it’s just not working out.

If my Facebook feed is any indication, I am not alone in wondering if my children might be better off if I were to pull them out of the public school system altogether.

Homework has always sucked, but I don’t remember it ever causing so much family strife when I was growing up as it does now. I don’t remember my parents ever crying because they couldn’t understand my homework well enough to be able to help me with it. I don’t remember my parents really helping me with my homework much at all.

Back then, my homework was MY homework. It wasn’t my parents’ homework. They were there for me if I had a question, but otherwise, I was expected to take responsibility for my own work. Even when I did ask the occasional question, my dad’s standard answer was, “I don’t know: let’s look it up.” He would then make me figure out which encyclopedia I needed (wow, am I old!), and then he would watch as I paged through the book looking for the topic I needed. How’s that for teaching me an important life skill that I would actually use someday? (Sans encyclopedia, of course!)