Busy Work

My oldest three kids were insatiably curious. If I wanted them to read a book, all I had to do was bring it home from the library or leave it lying around the living room -- it would get read, consumed, devoured. But my next-to-youngest isn't as curious. He doesn't need to know how things work and what people think and what's going on in the world. Part of this may be due to his inborn nature just being different from his siblings. Part of it, though, is probably due to the amount of time we spent with his sister's doctors and therapists when he was just a toddler and preschooler. We didn't do as many science experiments, take as many walks, read as many kiddy books, as we'd done with the older children.

Since we've been homeschooling, I've despised busy work. It has always seemed like a waste of time. If the kids can learn something by practicing it 4-5 times, why make them do the handwriting or the math 30 times? If we can work on things orally, through discussion and reading and working out concepts, why make them sit in chairs and write just for the sake of have some worksheets filled out? We are people who know how true is the saying, "So many books, so little time!" Why divert our limited time from those books and those projects and those educational videos to something as dreary as seatwork?

But right now, I'm finding busy-work to be somewhat useful. If I have a kid who is perfectly content to read comic books and play video games all day, then I am not content. I can do interesting educational activities with him, and he will enjoy them. I can even make him study certain things on his own, but of course he retains very little of it. I am discovering, though, that busy-work doesn't hurt him. Oh, he may think it's injurious to his time in front of the computer or tv. But for some odd reasion, I just don't have a lot of sympathy for his grief.

For the older kids, busy-work distracted them from the excitement of learning. Because of that, I see busy-work as detrimental. But in recent weeks, I'm beginning to see that busy-work isn't altogether bad. It's certainly better than perpetually vegging out.