When my son started school in the fall of 2015, I knew there would be a few challenges to overcome. Because he was attending a francophone program, the catchment zone was quite large, and he would have to start each day with a forty-five-minute bus ride across downtown Toronto. My husband and I both worked full time, so my son would have to be in after-school care until one of us could get him, which would usually be around 6 p.m. Taking transit home took around forty-five minutes, which meant that we didn’t arrive at our apartment until close to 7 p.m. Add dinner and a bath into the mix, and that made for a long day. Still, I wasn’t too worried. I thought it would all be fine—and, honestly, it was fine right up until the homework started.
The worksheets began trickling home during grade one, and by the next year, my son was getting thick weekly packets of them. The board policy was that children in his grade were supposed to receive around twenty minutes’ worth of work per night, but in our house, the agony was never that brief. One week in grade two, my son came home with seventeen pages of homework, printed front and back—thirty-four worksheets filled with math problems and language exercises. He worked on them every night, but by Sunday, he was only about three quarters of the way through. He cried as he struggled to finish the homework. I cried as I emailed his teacher to tell her he hadn’t been able to finish it. We both felt like we’d failed.
