I am not going to do it and you can’t make me do it. My 10-year-old daughter did not say that in words, but you could see it in her eyes, in her stance, and by looking at the work, she had finished so far. We had apparently come to an impasse. I was determined that she would finish her schoolwork and turn it in on time. She was determined that she would finish her work when and if she felt like it, and turn it in when and if she felt like it.

It is comical when you think about it. A 10 year old child who weighs 68 pounds, and stands about 54 inches high, standing up to a grown woman who has lived nearly half a century. At times like these, it takes all of my internal control to keep myself from laughing aloud or cracking a smile.

I maintained my composure long enough to send her to brush her teeth and then on to bed. Once she was out of site and earshot, Super Dad and I could formulate the next move. She has been working diligently to catch up her schoolwork all week, but it needs to be checked periodically. Otherwise, she may carry an error all the way through the entire subject.

For example, she didn’t really understand which part of the sentence was the subject or the predicate. The curriculum we use has 10 workbooks, each about 60 pages long or 10 units on the computer. Because she didn’t turn in her work until she finished the book, she made the same errors with subjects and predicates on all the quizzes as well as on the final test. Therefore, she had to go back and redo several sections. You would think that alone would give her enough incentive to want it corrected more often, but it didn’t.

Her stubbornness prevents her from doing it the way I asked her to do it. As long as the work is being done, do I make an issue over having it graded periodically? Not if she is willing to go back and redo all the material she got wrong I guess.

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Photo Credit Julia Fuller 2007