I was talking to one of my teacher-friends the other day about the summer math work the kids have to do for school. Last summer they had to do about 50 sheets, but this year they’re logging time on Internet math sites. The worksheets were a lot of work, and the teachers didn’t much like having to grade all that the first week of school. “And half the time the parents do it anyway,” she said. 

Really?

Apparently, according to some of my other teacher-friends. They can spot it pretty well; the handwriting is too sure, and there aren’t any extraneous scribblings. Plus, almost every answer is correct. But the real proof is when the kids can’t do the work in class that they so expertly did at home.

Most of us help with elaborate book reports and the dreaded science project, but I had no idea parents were doing their kids’ homework and summer packets.

Have we become so obsessed with good grades that we don’t let our kids learn?

I had to hold my tongue recently when my sister told me she lets her 10-year-old stay home for ”an hour or so,” watching his 7-year-old sister while she finishes her shift at Pier 1.  My son is 11, and I wouldn’t leave him home alone, with or without his sister. (OK, once when he was sick, I left him alone for 20 minutes with orders not to set a toe out of bed while I drove his sister to school. I felt guilty for days.)

Most babysitting guidelines say kids are responsible enough at 12 or 13.  OK, I can see that. But 10?

Discussing parenting issues is a really sticky business with your siblings. What works for some doesn’t work for others, and it’s best not to get into it, especially if it’s a holiday and there’s wine involved.  But I kept having visions of something catching fire and my sister coming home to fire trucks and a child services official who has her charged with neglect. I don’t know what she makes at Pier 1, but it’s not worth that. And there are worse things that could happen…

In the end, I just told her to make sure they didn’t cook anything.

Am I wrong about this? Am I too overprotective?

What’s on your reading list this summer?

I decided to take a break from working on my master’s this summer because my Corps of Engineers husband got a three-month gig working in New Orleans. (That’s a whole other blog.…)  So, with some time to read non-textbook books, I’ve stocked my shelf with some old and new titles.

I’ve already knocked out “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (bleak, but beautifully written), “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen (entertaining with some well-written passages, but I thought she wrote the main character as more mature than he would’ve been just out of college), “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines (the journal entries by the wrongly convicted Jefferson will have you crying at the end), and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini of  “The Kite Runner” fame. (Read my comments in response to the iDiva’s blog  here; I’m memgal.)

I’m slowly working through Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” which I never had to read in high school, and then will start on “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert before the final installment of the Harry Potter series hits my doorstep in July. (I’m a fan.)

I want to add something from John Updike and Philip Roth, two authors I’ve inexplicably never read. Where should I start? What other must-read books should I add to my list?

Holy moly! I completely forgot how much college textbooks cost. I was checking out some of the online courses I’ll be taking for my master’s and saw that one class has six books. Six! I priced them at the Mizzou bookstore at about $250. I hadn’t factored in that extra expense. Maybe I should’ve waited on that new laptop….

I was complaining to my friend Christa, who recently got her master’s in nursing, and she put me on to bigwords.com. The site searches all the stores for you and gives you a list of the cheapest place to buy all of them as a group and another list that gives you the best price for each individual book. The six books I needed for my class cost only $119 — less than half what they are at the university’s bookstore.

Know any other big ways for college students to save money?
Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had a tradition the last several years of spending the last week of summer vacation on Dauphin Island, Ala. — kind of a “Last Hurrah” before everything gets crazy with school. A little slip of an island, it’s mostly residential. There are no chain restaurants or hotels. There’s one ice cream place, one pizza place, one combination grocery/hardware/fishing tackle store.

The first year we went, we didn’t even know where we were going. We just threw stuff in the car and headed south. No hotel reservations, no planes or shuttles to catch, no overpriced tickets to water parks… And no expectations.

It was the most relaxing vacation ever.

What is your favorite summer vacation? What do you do to celebrate the end of summer?
Read the rest of this entry »