Homework and the useless father

There comes a time in the life of every parent when they are forced, however grudgingly, to acknowledge a painful reality:

They can no longer help their children with homework.

It hurts to admit this, because what you're essentially saying is, "Yes, this person whose diaper I used to change as recently as 10 minutes ago, it seems, is now learning things that are beyond my capacity to understand. Or if I do have the capacity to learn them, I certainly don't have the time or inclination."

There is no clear-cut dividing line between the time when I was Smart Daddy and when I became Clueless Daddy on the homework front. That's partly because the complexity of your child's schoolwork increases very gradually, and partly because it happens more quickly in some subjects than others.

Take math, for example. My daughter Elissa is studying calculus this year. I never took calculus. I managed to get a college degree from a highly regarded institution of higher learning, yet they never forced me to take calculus. In retrospect, that doesn't seem right.

The end result is that, when Elissa is having trouble with calculus, she knows it's absolutely no use coming to me. Really, if she approached me for help with calculus homework, I would break down crying then and there and ask if there was something easier I could do for her - like building a working model of the solar system out of Corn Flakes.

The same goes with Chloe's geometry homework, and both of the girls' high school-level science homework. Just not my thing. But an English or history essay? Ah, now we're in my territory. No matter how far my kids climb up the academic ladder, I'm confident I will always be able to edit their papers. Writing and editing are what I do every day. That's my sweet spot. Even if I don't fully understand the content, I can make it sound good.

Jared is right about in my transition zone. He's in 7th grade, which is the time when everything starts getting more difficult and out of my Middle-Aged Guy Sphere of Knowledge. Fortunately, Jared is a pretty smart kid and rarely needs help. And when he does, it's in French. I got a pretty solid grounding in French, having taken 14 years of instruction in the language (from 1st grade all the way through my junior year in college). I can still conjugate most of the common verbs, and my vocabulary isn't bad, either. French I can do.

Melanie has been coming home the last couple of years with what would seem to be simple arithmetic problems. Right now they're multiplying three-digit numbers. Easy, right? Well, yeah, I can get the correct answer. It's just that they've changed the method on me.

You remember how we were taught to multiply multi-digit numbers, right? It was a pretty straightforward process of multiplying the top row by each bottom-row digit one at a time, and adding together the resulting products. Short of breaking out a calculator, that's the only way I know how to do it, and it's what the good people who comprised the faculty of Mapledale Elementary School taught me.

But it's not what they teach now, apparently. Now they have the kids breaking out the numbers by the hundreds, tens and ones places in a process that at first seemed to me to be a lot more work until I realized it's actually no harder than the old-fashioned method. AND it would appear to help them understand numerical relationships better. With all my heart I want to scream, "Why can't they just do it the way we used to do it and leave well enough alone?" And all the while I'm thinking to myself, "Hey, this is actually pretty cool."

Jack, meanwhile, is in kindergarten. I can still totally dominate kindergarten. There's nothing school-related Jack asks that I can't answer, which is why he still thinks I know everything. I want this phase to last as long as possible because he's my youngest and therefore the last kid who's going to think that, and I know when the day comes that he starts asking me about quadratic equations, I'll have no choice but to break out the Corn Flakes.