Humbled by 7th Grade Homework

Last night both kids asked for help with their homework. Vance's was double-digit multiplication. Easy peasy lemon squeezy (yeah, I said it). Then I moved across the table to Emily.

There I sat, the proud recipient of a College of Journalism degree struggling to help my 7th-grade daughter with her Language Arts homework. It was about infinitive phrases. Ok. Infinitives. Easy peasy ...

"Is the infinitive phrase in the following sentences used as a subject, object, predicate nominative or modifier?" Then I read each sentence. Then I re-read the instructions. Then I re-read each sentence.

The 7th grader is getting impatient.

So, like any modern parent, I said, "Can you give me 5 minutes?" and looked up "infinitive phrase functions" on-line.

It's where I go when I don't know how to do something - solve algebra equations, fix a household problem, clear cookies from the new computer, figure out who was in that movie that time (because I'd swear it was this guy, but Eric says it's the other guy. And yeah, I don't think I watched that whole movie, but I need to be right. But I was wrong. But, for the record, there were sites reporting that this guy played that role. They were just as wrong as I was.) ...

Eric thinks I'm a Luddite (I'm really just a pragmatist. I only need as much technology as I will use. And sometimes it's quicker to just check the phonebook or dictionary rather than look it up on-line.), but I love that you can access any information you need on-line. (I read an article questioning if Google is making us dumber, letting brain connections die off as we do less real critical thinking. That's a valuable point that I would love to discuss at length, but I use Yahoo anyway.)

I can find it. I can translate it. I can calculate it. I can predict it. And it's all there in a pretty box that looks like a TV.

When I was in 7th grade, you'd better have taken good notes in class because that was all the homework help you were going to get. We didn't even have a set of encyclopedias. And our library access was the weekly stop of the "bookmobile" (and quite frankly I was only getting Archie comics and Judy Blume books there. Neither helped in Algebra.)

Still, it's extremely humbling to have to look up 7th grade Language Arts. Tonight, thankfully her questions were about recessive and dominant genes. I saw Punnett squares and middle school victory flashed before my eyes. I can rock some Punnett squares like a 7th grade geneticist. Plus it's just glorified cross-multiplication, right? And I proved my incredible prowess at that already (lets pretend I can brag about that). So I felt better.

But you don't want to know about the math problem she showed me. (Plus, if I told you, I think I'd develop a twitch.)

Love - Val