Homework for Babies

OK, he's not a baby. But he's three, only two or three years away from baby-dom. He's a boy. He's his father's son (short attention span). And he gets homework every day!
At first the assignments were fun.
Scribble on a piece of paper with different colored pencils.

Scrunch up paper and glue it above the line.

Complete the drawings.

Paint all over the page.

Cut out things that are yellow and paste them to the page.


But little by little they are getting harder and longer.
Color the smaller circles blue and decorate the large circle however you want.


But the worst has been the English homework - it is only sent on Fridays but last Friday it was so long (about 8 pages - 2 parts of the body on each page - Agustin had to cut out the parts of the body and glue them under the corresponding word). Of course, he can't read, so who do you think gets stuck doing his homework?

Actually, I don't really do his homework. Most Ecuadorian parents do - which, obviously, makes no sense at all, although when faced with battling your 3-year-old to sit down for an hour and cut out miniature eyes from magazines and glue them onto a piece of paper, or just doing it yourself in five minutes - the choice doesn't always seem so black and white.

So, I am the mean mom who makes him do his own homework, the way he interprets it. Which means sometimes he goes out of the lines. Sometimes he glues things over the words. Sometimes his lines are far from straight.

So I get notes from his teacher: "I said to tear the paper and glue it, not rip it."

Was it a problem with my translation of trozar? Maybe not - after asking various people what trozar meant, I got such a variety of interpretations that I no longer knew what the teacher meant. He only got one star on that assignment, presumably because I didn't do it for him.

More than once people have hinted that maybe, if I want him to get good grades and be a good student, I should do the homework myself.

I can't even dignify that statement with an answer!