My sixth grader is struggling to catch up on some missing
assignments these days, which is causing me to have flashbacks about my own grisly
academic experiences. I’m doing what I can to help him get the work done by providing
a quiet environment, structured time—20 minutes of work, 5 minute break—and the
tools he needs (a compass and ruler, mostly). At this point if I could do the
exercises myself and turn them in for him, I probably would, because I’m so
sick of having to nag him.
I told him the story about how I learned the hard lesson
that it’s easier to do the assignments when they’re given than try to catch up
after the fact: In the fourth grade we had a vocabulary building workbook
called Wordly Wise. It was a fairly common tool in use at the time, and still
exists today. I’ll even admit it was a good tool, and thanks to it I know things
like what “scruple” means.
Wordly Wise lessons all followed the same pattern: they
presented a list of featured words, then used the same three or four exercises
to teach the definitions and correct usage. They tried to make it fun, but it’s
hard to inject a lot of charm and appeal into what’s essentially rote
memorization. The last activity in each section was a sort of crossword or acrostic
through which ran the answer to a riddle or the punch line to a joke. I’m sure
that like most things for kids at that time, they were fairly lame. The bar was
pretty low—after all, most of our humor came from bubble gum wrappers or Dixie cups, and consisted
of knock knock jokes and puns—but even with that pitiful standard, Worldy Wise
managed to undercut it.
I loathed Wordly
Wise.
So much so that at some point in about February of fourth
grade, I made an executive decision and declined to engage further with Wordly
Wise. My rebellion was discovered sometime around May, and my decision was
overturned. The upshot was that I had to do an extra Wordly Wise chapter each
week in addition to completing the one that was actually due.
You’d think I’d be smart enough to just do it and get it
over with, but you don’t know what a stubborn little asshole I could be. While I did
the other two or three activities more or less according to their rules, the
acrostic was not anything I wanted to have anything to do with. Instead of using
the vocabulary words given, I read the clues and thought of other random words
that would fit the definition and used them. If that meant I needed to draw a
few extra boxes on the end, or that all the boxes weren’t filled, well, the
world wasn’t always a perfect place, was it?
Naturally this second flouting of the rules didn’t go over
well with any of the authorities involved. I was given a pink pearl eraser and
told to fix that shit, and fix it fast. I probably had some other pentaly that most likely involved a suspension of television viewing privileges.
Clearly that punishment made little impression on me, but the lesson I learned
from dicking around and not doing the work did.
I guess the conclusion I can draw is that while the loss of permission to watch “Donny & Marie” or whatever may have encouraged me to
avoid a similar situation in the short term, the memory of how unpleasant the whole experience was is what has inspired me to keep myself
caught up (more or less) over the last 35+ years.
My intention in telling this story to my son was to help him avoid the same mistake I made, which clearly didn't happen. Secondary to that, I hope the same lesson I learned will translate to him and he'll avoid getting into this predicament in the future, because I’m really over this shit.
