Reading Instructions Good, Comprehending Instructions Better

As expected, the boy came home with homework. As he’s been doing so far this year, he sat down and got started on it right away, working on the math work that is due tomorrow. He has reading and spelling work that is not due until later this week.

I thought of this homework as “Tetris” homework, referring to the arcade game. He was supposed to work with shapes that he could create by arranging 4 squares such that at least 1 full side of a square was touching another full side of another square. Thus, why I thought of the Tetris game- anyone who played that would immediately know there are only 5 shapes that can be arranged: an ‘L’, a short ‘T’, a block, a line and a ‘S’ or ‘Z’ if you squint at it really hard.

The boy, never having played Tetris, didn’t know that so he had to work at it. The instructions told him to cut out 4 squares on the back of the paper so he could play with them and arrange them. They also told him to ignore duplicates that were mirrors or flipped variations of the same shape, like a backwards ‘L’. Finally, he was supposed to draw the shapes on grid on the back of the paper.

The only part he seemed to get was the drawing the shapes on the grid. He wanted to draw the straight line horizontally and vertically. Then he wanted to draw the ‘L’ in it’s various different configurations. He never cut out the squares either. He did manage to finish that work, but not without a lot of erasing and a little prodding from myself about following the directions.

Then came his spelling. He wanted me to give him a spelling quiz. He has 80 something words to work with this week. It sounds impressive until you realize they are variations on one word like “stab, stabbed, stabbing” or “state, stated, stating.” I gave him a quiz, but I just picked a single tense from each group of 3 words, rather than working through all the variations of each word.

He wrote each of these word 3 times, because “that’s what the directions said to do.” Then, he started writing all the other variations 3 times each as well. He had completed about 60 of the words when the Wife happened to look at the directions.

They directions actually were to take the quiz from a parent and then write and misspelled word 3 times. He didn’t misspell any of the words I’d quizzed him on. That means he did a lot of extra spelling. A lot of extra spelling.

He then began what has to be the most dramatic overreaction to anything ever.

First, he threw himself onto the ground and buried his face in his arm. There he laid, quietly. I chuckled, thinking it was just a dramatic one off to realizing he’d done a bunch of unnecessary extra work. Little did I realize that he was actually a tropical depression developing into a category 5 hurricane.

When he got up, he was mad and he was crying. It started as just a whine about how he’d messed up his homework. I was still unawares about what was coming and just ignored him. It was a little ridiculous at that stage, but I simply assumed he’d be over it. At this point, he was just mournfully staring at his paper, caught in that emotion where he thinks he’s done something that can’t be undone.

The whining then began to build. It was developing into that roaring cry, where a kid is screaming at the top of his lungs while he’s crying. His face was starting to turn pink and his gesticulating was getting more spastic- like he’d make up his mind to do something and then change it a half-second later and kept doing it over and over again. I finally realized that things were getting a whee bit out of control and I tried to whisk him away to his martial arts class. I firmly told him “Let’s go” and headed out the door, fully expecting him to be right behind me.

I sat out in the car waiting for him. And waiting for him. And waiting for him. I honked the horn once. Then again. Then a third time. Finally, the door swung open and out marched … the Wife. I turned the car off and immediately realized just how bad things had gotten.

I could hear him, wailing and stomping, from where I was out in the driveway. Great, roaring “AHHHHHHH’s” echoed from within the house. I’m pretty certain it was vibrating with all the stomping he was doing.

Apparently, he was looking for his flip flops and couldn’t find them. He was still upset about his homework. The Wife had come outside because she needed to get away from him for a few moments. I went over to the house and yelled in for him to get moving. As I walked back to the car, where the Wife had gone to in the interim, I laughed. The lass had broken last week over homework. Now, the boy had barely outlasted her by a week, all because he hadn’t comprehended his homework instructions.

When he finally came outside, he was still wailing and his face was red. There were no more tears though. He was just screaming like a mad-child. He had snapped, pure and simple.

I refused to take him anywhere in that state and he finally settled down to a much more respectable sulk. On any other day, sulking over his homework like that wouldn’t have been acceptable. But this wasn’t any other day and I wasn’t going to complain. We headed off to his martial arts class.

Which was turned out to be a timely thing. The theme for the month is self-control.