Proclamation of Amnesty

The honeymoon days of school end so quickly. It’s the first day, everybody wears their new clothes and loves their new teachers, and then only days later you notice how nasty your kid’s tennis shoes are and what on earth is that teacher thinking sending home this insane homework?

Laura, who unlike her little brother already understands all about consequences, has also begun to settle into her new room. A big fifth grader, a Safety Patrol member, a Star AR Reader, she positively floats around feeling confident and sophisticated, and when I pick her up from her after-school program, the little kids flock around her as if she were their own personal movie star. She wiggles her new loose tooth, one of five she’ll lose soon, her dentist tells us, and can’t wait to be that much older. I look at her and see this beautiful half-grown woman, and keep my mouth shut, without mentioning to her how the Queen of Fifth Grade will be a peon again next year, lowest of the lowly middle-school students. She may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

In typical public school fashion, though, all is not well in the Queen’s new world. The other night we spent eternity, I’m pretty sure, on her social studies homework, though, and it’s only the second full week or school. This does not bode well for the future. Her assignment seemed simple enough: read a chapter of her social studies book, come up with the proper names for each of the questions from the readings, and then find those names in a word search grid. She worked on it a little earlier this week but only had about four or five of fifteen questions answered herself and so asked me to help her. We looked together at her book—which was all history, by the way, but evidently history is now “social studies”—and found the next one or two answers in about the first two paragraphs of the chapter, so I fussed at her and told her, basically, to sit her sorry behind down and read that chapter carefully and then go back through it looking for the answers, because obviously they were all right there, no problem.

Hours or days later, she was down to the four or five still unanswerable questions. I’d been almost forcibly restraining myself from grinding my teeth for all that time, because I can’t stand watching how slowly she works sometimes, how she will make fifteen questions last until the end of next week or possibly even the end of time, but I was keeping my mouth shut still, which I believe must be the second most important role of the parents of the tween set, right after delivering long lectures. And then she started getting this whiny tone to her voice too, the one that immediately changes parents like me from rational college-educated folk to ravening maniacs. “Give me that damn book,” I snapped at her, “and you start finding the answers you already got in the word search.” I started with “Who was the founder of Tuskegee Institute?” and scanned the chapter over, pretty sure already it was Booker T. Washington, because I teach a little of his Up from Slavery in my American lit class, but I couldn’t find it in the chapter. I checked Tuskegee in the index. Nothing. I found the page number for Washington’s biography and looked that up. Nothing. I read the chapter before and after the one in question. Nothing.

Laura and I had a little conversation at this point. Did her teacher talk about this in class? She didn’t think so. Where were her notes? I inspected them, finding nary a mention of Mr. Washington or his school, and we moved onto the next topic of discussion. How are you taking notes in class? On her honor, she is only supposed to copy down what Ms. H. actually writes on the board. And there was nothing about Tuskegee on the board. My first impulse was that my daughter, like my own students, needs to learn to take better notes, so I politely mentioned this little fact to her, Googled “Tuskegee founder” just to be sure and told her to write down Washington. The next question asked about the law in the south that segregated blacks from whites; easy enough, a whole paragraph in her book talked about black codes, so while she was looking up another answer, I started looking for “black codes” in the word search. I scanned the entire grid, looking at every B. Then I did it again. I tried C. And did it again.

I asked Chris to look for it. I checked one more time. Black codes was simply not on that sheet. Chris, who is much better at word puzzles than I am, found Jim Crow laws. “But the book says black codes,” I wailed, and pointed out the passage. We looked up Jim Crow in the index—nothing. Looked for it in the chapter. Nothing. He actually wrote it on the sheet, before I reminded him that it was Laura’s homework and perhaps she should at least write it on there herself. Molly’s mother called us—could we find black codes in the word search? And did we know who founded Tuskegee? Let’s just say that this sort of thing went on for quite some time. Finally we Googled one last time more to find out that the pardon granted to white Southerners after the Civil War was Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty (shockingly enough, also not in the book), handed Laura her sheet to finish the word search, and nearly collapsed. At this point, she made the strategic mistake of asking “Did you find all the words in my word search for me?”—and dear Reader, I must draw a veil over the events that next occurred.

Before the social studies incident, I’d already written Ms. H a note asking how grades were weighted on the progress report she’d sent home that day, so I wasn’t going to write another one. So Chris and I sent Laura off to school the next morning, reminding her to tell her teacher that we couldn’t find the answers in her book and so her parents had helped her find them online—as if I’d let my ten year old lose on Google without me glued to her chair. Then I charitably spent the morning trying to imagine that maybe Ms. H was in a hurry and sent the sheet home without realizing that the answers weren’t in the book. Molly’s mom wrote a note to Ms. H about the assignment, and told me tonight that Ms. H wrote back that all the answers were in their notes, handouts or books except for two of them, and she wanted the worksheet to be challenging. “Well,” Laura said, “it certainly was,” and I couldn’t help but silently agree. Probably Laura’s just not taking notes like she should be. But I imagine that this homework assignment was some kind of test to see which parents are doing their homework for their kids, or maybe just who has internet access at home. Having spent about a half hour tonight relearning decimals, I do have to say that I’d really rather not go to fifth grade again, and I wonder if Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty might cover that eventuality? Somehow, I doubt it.