I Love Tuesdays!

I Love Tuesdays!

Monday evenings, my eight-year old son has soccer practice (right during the dinner hour from 6 to 7:30; it’s crazy, but accommodates us working parents). Wednesdays, both boys have music lessons. Thursdays and Fridays, they go to taekwondo. Every day, they attend an afterschool program to accommodate our work schedule, and every day, they have homework (at eight and nine years old!). Weekends are great, but on weekends we sometimes have soccer games or a belt test or some other obligation, birthday parties, and always house cleaning, folding laundry, and other household chores.

But Tuesdays…Tuesdays, the boys just come home. I love Tuesdays.

And I can’t believe I contemplated giving up my Tuesdays to put them in a parent-facilitated math club!

Friends of my eight-year old were concerned with the math education their kids were getting this year. I don’t know if it was mistrust of the state’s new curriculum Common Core or the teacher. Nonetheless, the parents of these kids—several of them best friends of my son (and my best friends too)—started rotating at their homes once a week afterschool teaching Singapore Math to enhance the kids’ love and understanding of numbers. Singapore is a teacher-created math curriculum accumulated from “the best of” around the world. The kids seemed to enjoy it very much, get a lot out of it, and the parents were all smiles about it. Hearing of this program, a couple other parents decided to do the same, and initially, I jumped on the bandwagon. I couldn’t join the existing group, because they were full up, but the other moms and dads were wonderfully enthusiastic, and we started exchanging emails, doing the crazy scheduling we parents do these days, and I bought the workbooks on Amazon. The other parents said Tuesday was the best day for them.

I was going to sign my son up, which also meant signing me up: for studying the philosophies and methodologies of Singapore Math, for meeting with the parents to plan the curriculum and assess it once started, prepping every third week to teach the kids, for picking them up and hosting them at my house (a half hour of math, 45 minutes of raucous playdate, I imagined), and for picking my son up from their houses the other two Tuesdays right during the dinner hour since they had to have a later start time with their work schedules.

Suddenly, Tuesdays looked bleak. But I continued on in this vein anyway: 21^st Century parental logistics, which is never-ending.

Then, before holiday break, the boys and I had one of our Tuesdays. I brought my kids home at 4pm, and the time just spilled out before us.

“Mom, can we get ourselves snacks?” “Of course,” I replied.

“Can we play with the neighbor before doing our homework?” The sun was shining on a warm west coast winter’s day. “Yes,” I replied.

“Mom, can I take out my guinea pig and hold her awhile?” My little guy used Christmas grandparent money to buy himself this new pet, along with her cage, all her supplies, and the responsibility. “You bet,” I said, “Wash your hands after. We start homework at five.”

There’s nothing more pleasing for a parent than being able to say: “YES” to your kids without hesitation, guilt, shame or doubt.

After an hour, they both sat down to do homework without prompting. Because it wasn’t yet time to make dinner, I got to sit down beside them.

It’s hard to find great value in much of my kids’ homework—mostly spelling words, a little reading comprehension and math worksheets. I never had homework in second grade. In fourth grade, my only homework was occasional special projects like writing to the tourist boards of different states and countries. This was a great assignment. I received my own mail, which was amazing, and I fell in love with all things Connecticut, learned a ton about Danish cheese, and started writing the tourist boards of every state in the union.

Nonetheless, daily, skill-based homework is required of my children. I find with my active eight and nine-year old boys that sitting with them while they do their homework (even if I say nothing at all), versus telling them to do it on their own while I cook dinner or take a phone call or check email, makes all the difference in the world in their enjoyment and absorption of the material. Rather than the declarative: “I hate homework!” I hear, “Hey, that was fun” or at the very least, pride in completing it. On days other than Tuesdays, I have to watch the clock to make sure we get everything done and to the next place on time. The boys complain that there isn’t enough time to relax as I set the kitchen timer to warn that homework starts in fifteen minutes, usually while I’m boiling water for pasta.

But Tuesdays are different. That Tuesday, after homework was done and tucked into backpacks, we had a lovely dinner, cleared the table, and then the kids practiced their music: my older son was learning Seven Nation Army by White Stripes on his electric guitar, my younger one sight-read Purple-People Eater on the piano—how fun is that compared to the tuneless scales I had to play everyday. They took a long bath while I read aloud to them, and then each of them read to themselves and got into bed on time at 8:30, a rarity on other days.

They woke up the next day on time, rested, and content.

This prompted me to ask: why was I considering committing to an afterschool math club? Why would I give up our Tuesdays?

Looking at it honestly, the reasons were mostly psychological. Certainly there was my unhappiness with the basic worksheet-led, stay-in-your-seat style of public education in California (even the best of schools) and wanting my kids to love school and learning, but the truer reasons were not wanting my son to be “left out,” not wanting to be left out myself, wanting to give my children everything they need (Am I being a good parent? Am I doing the right thing? The other parents seem to manage it all.), my curiosity, and—I have to admit it—the old “keeping up with the Jones.’”

The decision for our respected friends to engage in Singapore Math was a good one for them, which made it even harder for me to follow my heart, go against the grain, to not worry about what they might think, and to say that powerful, powerful word that every toddler knows before it is “lifed” out of them: “NO.”

Both my son’s math abilities are above average. It did take until December with the transition to the new state curriculum for the second grade math become satisfyingly challenging, but my youngest loves “regrouping,” the new term for “carrying the one.”

I also realized that if I was going to complement my kids’ math education, I wanted to do it through real life application: cooking (measurement, fractions), allowance, investment and consumerism (addition, multiplication, money facts, weight, percentages), art projects (patterns, shapes), home improvement/building a clubhouse (angles, shapes, planes, graphing and proportion, multiplication, grouping, division), and occasional online games. 

Of course, creating regularity without the accountability of a group is much more of a challenge, but this is what fits into our lives best. 

There is value in our Tuesdays that outweighs all the reasons for giving it up: time, simplicity, a sense of accomplishment without stress, and a certain quality of life. And those are just the start.

I love my Tuesdays, and I just hope with today’s pressures on kids and parents I will always remember this and create plenty of Tuesdays, for them and me.