Why I Asked Myself If My Son’s Homework Was a Waste of Time
Leo’s pencil had made a small dent in the kitchen table. He was supposed to be doing his fact fluency worksheet—fifty multiplication problems, numbers zero through nine. The paper was blank except for his name, written in pencil, slightly erased because he didn’t like how the L came out. He’d been sitting there for eight minutes.
“Just start with the first row,” I said. “Six times seven. You know that.”
“Do I?” he asked. “We did this at school. Twice. Why do I have to do it at home?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I said something about practice and about getting faster. He didn’t look convinced. Neither was I.
That was the first time I let myself ask the question I had been circling for weeks: Is this thing a waste of time? It felt like a dangerous thought. I’m a parent who supports teachers. I send in extra snacks and read the class newsletter. I don’t complain about homework. But supporting teachers doesn’t mean pretending every worksheet is doing something good.
I grew up doing timed multiplication sheets. They worked for me. I liked the chase of it—knowing the answer before my pencil touched the paper. So I expected Leo to feel the same. He doesn’t. He can explain multiplication. He builds arrays with Legos and talks about groups of numbers. But when a timer is going, he freezes. He wrote “3 × 9 = 27” on Monday and “3 × 9 = 21” on Tuesday. Not because he didn’t know it, but because his brain was busy worrying.
The worksheet wasn’t teaching him anything. It was testing everything he already knew, then asking him to perform it faster. For a child who gets anxious under pressure, that’s not practice. It’s just stress with extra steps.
One evening, after the same blank page scene, I asked Leo to put his pencil down. “Let’s talk about this for a minute. What do you think this worksheet is trying to teach you?”
“To go faster,” he said.
“Does going faster help you learn it?”
“No. You learn it by knowing it.”
He was right. He wasn’t being difficult. He had simply noticed that the worksheet wasn’t doing its job.
So I emailed his teacher. I tried not to make it sound like a complaint. I asked if Leo could do a shorter version of the sheet for two weeks, just the last row, and spend the rest of the time practicing the facts he didn’t already know. I wasn’t sure how that would be received. Some teachers would see it as a parent trying to get their kid out of work. But his teacher wrote back the next morning and said, “Try it. Just make sure he practices the facts he doesn’t know cold.”
That phrase—“know it cold”—helped me think about what was actually useful. Not angry, not frozen. Just automatic. When you hear the problem and the answer shows up before you have time to count.
We didn’t buy anything fancy. We used a deck of cards. I took out the face cards, dealt two cards, and asked Leo to multiply them. He started out counting in his head, and I let him. But after a few hands, he began recognizing pairs. Eight and six stopped being a mystery. Three and seven became instant. We made a pile of the ones he had to think about, which turned out to be smaller than the worksheet had suggested.
We practiced the hard pile. Not all fifty facts. Not the whole table. Just the four or five that actually needed work. Ten minutes most nights, not twenty-five. No timer. No reward chart. I didn’t say “good job” after every answer. I just dealt the cards, and eventually he stopped treating it like a test.
The next Friday, his timed test score was the same as before. I wondered if I’d made a mistake. But something else had changed. He didn’t argue about practice time. He didn’t stare at the table. He said “practice” without rolling his eyes. The week after that, he missed five problems instead of eight. It wasn’t a dramatic improvement, but the resistance had dropped enough that learning could actually happen.
I don’t have a perfect system for deciding whether an assignment is busywork. But I have a better question now: What exactly is being practiced? If the child can already do the thing, and the assignment is just repeating it in a format that doesn’t make it stick, then the only real practice is compliance. That matters in school, sure—learning to do things you don’t love is part of growing up. But compliance isn’t the same as understanding, and it’s worth knowing the difference.
If you’re staring at a worksheet and wondering the same thing, you don’t have to start by emailing the teacher. You can start smaller. Ask the child what they think the assignment is for. Watch what happens when they don’t understand or when they already understand. Those are different struggles, and they ask for different responses.
We still have evenings where the packet sits untouched. I still hear myself say “just get it done” and wonder if I’m helping. But now I don’t ask whether the whole thing is a waste of time. I ask whether the work is doing its work. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it’s still being figured out.
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