My son said his math homework was a waste of time — here’s what I told him
“Mom, I already know this.” Leo didn’t look up from the worksheet. He had raced through the first row of multiplication facts and was now slowing down, scribbling mostly at random. 8×7. 9×6. The pencil looked like it had been chewed on, and his older brother was watching TV in the next room. I was stacking plates.
“Then why do I have to do twenty of these?” He pushed the paper across the table. “This is a waste of time.”
I opened my mouth to say something about practice and didn’t. Because there was a real question under the complaint. He wasn’t wrong that he knew what multiplication was. He could draw arrays, count by groups of five, even explain why 6×8 is double 3×8. The worksheet wasn’t teaching him anything new. It was asking him to do the same thing over and over, and at nine years old, that feels pointless.
I said something like “It’s to make you faster,” which he probably translated as “adults hate fun,” and we both went back to the paperwork.
Later that week, I brought it up with his teacher, Ms. Alvarez, during one of those end-of-day pickups where you stand in the hallway and hope not to be late. I asked her, almost apologetically, whether the facts drill was actually necessary. She didn’t give me a company line about practice being good. She said, “He knows the concept. What he doesn’t have is automaticity.” That word stopped me. She explained that when Leo gets to multi-column multiplication and division, he’ll need to hold several numbers in his head at once. If every step requires him to stop and count on his fingers or skip-count in his head, he loses track of the bigger problem. The repeated facts aren’t for the math. They’re for the mental space.
That made more sense than any homework pep talk I’d ever given. It also changed what we did at home.
We didn’t abandon the worksheet. We took a different approach. Instead of a whole sheet after school, I set a timer for five minutes and told him to answer out loud while I did the dishes. No pencil, no paper. He could skip any problem he didn’t know, but he had to stay in a steady rhythm. If he missed or hesitated, I didn’t make a big correction. I just moved on and came back to that fact later in the week. The point was speed, not perfection.
At first he thought this was a game. Then he thought it was boring. But because it was short, he stopped fighting it.
“You want me to just say them?” he said one night.
“Just call them out. Don’t stop. Even if you guess.”
He sat at the table, chin in hand, and started to recite. “Six times seven is forty-two. Eight times three is twenty-four.” He hesitated on 7×8. I didn’t say anything, just looked at the timer. He made a noise. “Um, fifty-six.”
“Good,” I said. “That one’s today’s sticky one.”
He rolled his eyes, but he also remembered it the next night. After about a week, the answers were starting to come out as whole words instead of calculations. He didn’t realize it, but he was no longer counting in his head.
The bigger moment came on a Saturday when he was building something with Legos. He needed to know if he had enough 4-stud bricks to make a 6-by-5 base. He looked around, counted to 20 or so, then paused and said, “Wait, that’s 24. No, 30.” He hadn’t even counted all the bricks. He had multiplied without thinking about it.
I didn’t say “See? That’s why we do the worksheet.” I just said “Yeah, 30,” and handed him the bin. But he stopped for a second. I could tell he was surprised at himself.
Part of me still wondered if the whole thing could have been done differently. Were there flash card games? Apps? Sure. There are a million ways to practice factors, and we’ve tried several. But the deeper issue wasn’t the format. It was the question of whether a task is actually necessary or just assigned because schools feel like they have to assign something.
That’s a legitimate question, and I don’t think every worksheet deserves defending. Some homework is busywork. It’s easy to end up with a packet that exists only to keep kids occupied. I’ve seen it. The difference I’ve learned to look for is not whether the work is fun, but whether it removes an obstacle for the kid.
A good practice task is one that does something for you later. For Leo, automaticity was that obstacle. Hearing him yell 56 without pausing meant that later, when he’s facing fractions or long division, he won’t have to stop at the first step. That’s not wasted time. That’s clearing a path.
What I said to Leo, in the end, wasn’t brilliant. We were sitting at the table again a few nights later, doing another row of facts, and he made a face at the paper. He said “This is still a waste of time.” I told him, “Maybe. But let’s do ten facts fast, and if you can get them all under five seconds, you’re done.” He liked that better than twenty write-them-out problems. I liked it because the goal was speed, not filling boxes.
We did ten. He missed one. We did ten again the next night. By the end of the week, he was done. He just was. The facts had stuck.
I’m not going to pretend that every homework battle ends that cleanly. There are still evens that don’t need to be done, spelling lists that disappear after the test, and the occasional project that seems designed to consume an entire weekend. I still look at those and wonder. But now I ask a quieter question before I let myself agree that it’s a waste: Is this building a path or just filling time? If it’s building a path, I’ll hold the line. If it’s just filling time, I’ll probably let it slide, and I’ll definitely tell the teacher.
Leo hasn’t asked about the multiplication facts again. But he’s going to ask some version of that question many times. Maybe about book reports. Maybe about practicing scales on his trumpet. Maybe about learning to tie his shoes when every sneaker he owns has Velcro. I don’t know yet. But I think my answer has gotten a little more honest.
Waste isn’t just about whether you learn something. It’s about whether what you’re doing is getting you closer to something you won’t have to think about later. And sometimes that happens in five-minute chunks at the kitchen table with a cheap pencil and a kid who would rather be watching TV.
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