What Makes a Home Work?
So, here we are at the House of Homework--all homework, all the time--working on tonight’s kindergarten assignment. Needless to say, it’s a killer.
“Package one raw egg,” the homework sheet says, “so that it can be dropped from the roof of the school and survive.”
This egg drop is in honor of something called Humpty Dumpty Day at my daughter’s kindergarten. There is a drawing of Humpty next to the instructions. He is sitting on the wall smiling smugly--the kind of smirk you see on people who’ve just bought their first luxury car.
“I’ve got a theory about Humpty,” I tell the little red-haired girl.
“What?”
“Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall from that wall,” I tell her.
I pause to let the drama build.
“He was pushed,” I say.
The little red-haired girl giggles at this. She doesn’t quite understand the joke, but she can tell from the way I say it that she is supposed to laugh.
She’s easy like that. With a word or two, I can make her laugh like a cartoon animal. Sometimes she will giggle till she hiccups. It’s a weakness really.
Little girl: Humpty Dumpty was pushed?
Me: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. There was never any inquiry. No grand jury. Nothing.
Little girl: Giggle. Hiccup. Giggle.
The House of Homework isn’t always this much fun. But tonight we have hiccups and oddball conspiracy theories. It’s a nice change of pace.
“It’s not good to throw things off the roof, is it, Daddy?”
The little red-haired girl knows there is a strict code of conduct in kindergarten. No cutting in line. No sticking things up your nose. And no hurling stuff off school roofs.
“If the teacher says it’s OK to throw something off the roof, then you can,” I explain.
“Even my brother?”
Just the thought of tossing her big brother off the roof makes her eyes light up. Because if it’s suddenly legal to toss things from roofs, brothers would be the first things to go.
“We’d have to package him so he wouldn’t break,” I say.
“Really?”
She giggles.
“Let’s just drop the egg,” she finally decides.
The directions are simple:
1. Place a raw egg in a Baggie.
2. Package your egg-in-a-Baggie so it will not break when it hits the ground when dropped from the roof of the school.
3. Your container may not exceed 7 inches on any side.
“How about a live chicken?” I say.
“What do you mean a chicken?”
“You know, we take a chicken with the egg still in it. Then drop it from the roof. It’ll just flutter to the ground.”
“Oh, Daddy.”
“You like it?”
“Quit kidding around, Dad.”
“Huh?”
“You’re always kidding around.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
*
At this point, my oldest daughter enters the room. Poor girl. She is carrying her schoolbook as if it were nuclear waste.
She looks older than her 13 years, her hair piled high on her head in a homework bouffant, the kind of hair you get from running your fingers through it hour after hour.
“Algebra?” I ask.
“Yep.”
She opens the algebra book and shows me the problem. The answer isn’t obvious. In algebra, the answer is never obvious. I blink a couple of times. The problem is still there. I blink a couple more times. No luck.
“Have you tried this?” I ask, pointing at a possible solution.
“Yep,” my daughter says.
“How about this?”
“Yes, Dad, I tried that.”
Long pause.
I used to be pretty good at algebra. But that was 150 years ago. And as my patient and lovely daughter likes to point out, “There are a lot more numbers now, huh Dad?”
So I study the question. If you stare hard enough at an algebra problem, it will sometimes back down.
“Did you ask your mother?” I finally say.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.”
Another long pause.
It’s as if she is waiting for me to get suddenly smarter. But as everybody knows, you don’t get smarter as you get older. You get wiser. And that can be a pretty lousy trade-off.
“Try diagraming it and see what happens,” I offer.
She turns with the algebra book and heads back to her room. It’ll be another late night here at the House of Homework. My lovely daughter is no math whiz. But she doesn’t quit. In the long run, that’s more important than algebra. At least, that’s what I keep telling her.
“Dad, the egg,” the little red-haired girl says.
We return to our egg-drop project. We’ve decided to add a little parachute to the egg’s container, just to be safe. It should take us only five minutes. If I’m lucky, we can stretch this time together to half an hour.
