EAT-STUDY

Amelia has been threatened with eat-study if she doesn't get her homework done at night. Well, not just her. The whole class.

"Eat-study" is just our word for it. The teacher calls it lunch detention. You eat lunch while doing the homework that you didn't do the night before.

My husband, Fred, hates eat-study with a passion. One thing teachers don't realize is that, if the kid has older siblings, the teacher is inheriting all the baggage from all the old teachers. Our son Alan, now a junior in high school, got eat-study in third grade. He got it for something he couldn't do anyway. He can't spell--he just can't, he has an IEP for it now--and that was also the year that the teacher told him he couldn't go out to recess until he could spell all the continents. (The continent fiasco was what propelled us into getting him tested for the IEP.)

So the mere mention of eat-study causes both me and Fred to freak out. Just the casual mention of "lunch detention" by Amelia, and we're both storming around, seeing red.

It's not necessarily about Amelia. It's more about Alan. But if Amelia's teacher is the one who is giving out eat-study this time, then she's the one who gets the blame.

Our feelings about eat-study run as follows:

(1) You've got them all the rest of the day, five days a week, nine months a year. That should be enough time to teach them math without dragging eat-study into it.

(2) They're just kids. Feed them, for gosh sakes. Let them eat lunch.

Amelia doesn't get her lunch eaten OR understand the work properly if she's trying to do both at once. It's stupid. Eat-study is stupid.

I suppose some people would be saying, so Why doesn't she just do her homework? Isn't it her fault (and yours) if she does get eat-study?

It's never that simple. What if she didn't understand the assignment? What if she accidentally left that paper at school and didn't have the questions? What if she can't figure out what the teacher's getting at, and she asks us for help, and we can't figure it out either? What if she thought she was supposed to do questions one through twenty, and it turns out it was actually one through forty, even numbers only? Anything can happen. It is possible to try to do homework and still not get it done. It's impossible to be 100% sure of avoiding eat-study just by working hard on your homework.

We've had kids in public schools for fourteen straight years now, ten straight years in this city's school system. This is only the second time anyone has imposed eat-study. Get over it. Let the kids eat lunch. If Amelia doesn't grow up to be an accountant or a rocket scientist, or even know what eight times seven is, we won't blame her fourth-grade teacher.