Here’s hoping that all of you on the Internets are with loved ones, giving thanks for the many wonderful things you may have in your life, first among them your health.

And now, a bit of fun!

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I was a terrible student. Terrible. I rarely did my homework. Don’t get me wrong. I was smart enough to do it, but I was too lazy to do it.

It would have been hard to tell from my test grades. I’m the kind of person who can do well on tests. Very well. Even without study or knowledge of material, I can sometimes do well. It makes my wife crazy, because she suffers from test anxiety and can study the material and still not do well. But I digress…

My son is just like me. He chooses not to do his homework. He is lazy about it. He’d prefer to do anything else. He goes through all of the same clarifying events that I went through. Failing grades because he has not completed enough of the assignments to pass. Failures on tests because of a failure to prepare.

Unfortunately for him, he inherited the laziness from me and the test anxiety from my wife. It means that without a significant amount of preparation, he cannot be successful on tests. This is creating great strife in the household. As I am not in the household most of the time, it creates strife long distance as well. It creates even more strife because, coincident with my departure to “Studio B” came a marked drop in homework completion rates and test scores. How guitly do I feel right now? Very.

So what to do? Here’s our plan at present:

1. My wife has given up the evening job she was working (which will cost us a significant amount of money) so that she can be home to pick up where I left off with the supervision of evening homework.
2. All televisions in the house are locked. No child can access television without a parent code. By the way, this is EXTREMELY inconvenient when trying to channel surf or avoid commercials. Change the channel, enter a code, change the channel, enter a code, etc.
3. My son’s non-internet gaming and writing only computer is disconnected. No games, all work to be done on the family computer.
4. No ipod for junior.
5. No social life. Grounded until further notice.

Will these be successful? With the single exception of #1, no. How do I know? I AM him, remember? How would YOU do it differently than me? I’m running out of options. Parental presence and non-stop supervision appear to be the ONLY successful options.

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Your kids had a bad day today at school. Really. Even worse than yesterday, and as far as education goes, yesterday was a terrible day.

Here’s why YESTERDAY didn’t work out so well:

• If your school allows costumes, most of the day was consumed with those costumes and their care, display, and discomfort.
• If your school did not allow costumes, the day was filled with discussions of costumes (all) and complaints about the prohibition of costumes (older children).

Whether or not costumes were involved, there was almost certainly a celebration of some type. In many schools, it was a Harvest Celebration. I applaud the more meaningful instructional component of this event. However, it still includes big piles of orange and black candy/ pastry/ decorations.

As for today, it’s a different issue. You see, while Halloween is a one day aberration, the week prior to Halloween often involves revving up and preparing. As such, the teachers want to get back to the real work of teaching. This is a great and noble aim, and I applaud all teachers for this goal.

Your children were woefully unprepared for this task today.

You see, they most likely ate poorly yesterday, if they ate any real food besides candy. They were revved up and over excited for the better part of the day. This is surely going to have a consequent fatigue period afterwards. Many of them were up later than normal last night while they tricked and treated about the neighborhood. These factors, further complicated by what may be a less than healthy snack and lunch today (“Mom, can I take a piece of my candy today?”) created today what may have been the perfect storm of inattention and distraction today in their classrooms.

It’s OK. Really. We expect it. We tried to plan around it, and the teachers always have a Plan B for the moment where their students are certain to fade out. I had one. I broke out the drums. They always find the energy for drums.

I just thought you ought to know.

(BTW- I talked in my most recent Digital Father Podcast about the whole sugar rush idea and whether it truly exists.)

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