The Homework

Last Friday, I was checking my Kid’s school app for the homework he had got. This is what he was supposed to do.

After Friday , generally the beast mode sets in and i was pretty certain that he is going to forget about this homework for sure. For most of the weekend he was busy playing Table Tennis and other stuff and i made sure not to remind him of his homework.

Fast forward Monday morning, the usual school drill started. He got up at 6:45 , brushed his teeth, had his milk and started getting ready for school.

I whispered to him : Aari what happened to that Kindness activity that you were supposed to do? Aren’t you supposed to submit it today??

He immediately realized he had missed it and now there were hardly 20-25 minutes left for the bus to come. I could sense he was worried but very little he could do now.

I generally like him to be in these scenarios. It is pretty easy to face your teachers when you have done all your homework. In this case i didn’t want to help him as i wanted him to learn that he made a choice to not to do the homework and now he should be man(read Kid) enough to face the consequences also. When you make a choice, you choose the consequences also.?

Anyways, after 5 mins with literally tears in his eyes and a blank A4 size sheet in his hand, he was looking at me for help.

I knew we didn’t have the time to go out to find some person in need of help and then help him/her out and then take a photo with that person and then come back and write about it. My mind? was on overdrive to think of some way which is not Deceit or a lie but still helps him submit something. This is what i came up with

See Aari, we’ll not paste any picture in the A4 size sheet because we should always do kindness in private. It is offensive and disrespectful to the person you helped when you ask them for a photo that you’ll use to show off somewhere else.

With this logic we were sorted with the upper half of our A4 sheet. He bought into that explanation and felt confident enough to say that to his teacher. I was patting myself on the back on the ingenuity of this answer.

Very quickly we realized that this explanation only worked for one half of the homework and not the other half where we had to write about the act of kindness he did. After some deep brainstorming for the next 30-40 seconds , he reminded me of the kindness he showed to us when he cleaned his room over the weekend.

“Mumma and you were busy over the weekend, so i decided to clean my room myself so that you don’t have to do it later.”

As we had literally 5-7 mins for the bus to come, he drew a line in the middle of the A4 sheet. Top half was a placeholder for the image which would stay empty, in the second half he wrote 3-4 lines on how considerate he was when he decided to clean his own room.

After these 3-4 lines, he put an asterisk(*), just like the one you see before the fine grained terms and conditions which read like this

* We should do all acts of kindness in private and hence no picture is pasted.

He looked a bit worried about all this sorcery that we had cooked up in the last 30 mins but still this was all that we had and he had to submit this only.?He went to school, and I came to the office. I was pretty much sure that he would get called out for the lousy homework he(we) had done.?

In the evening once I reached back home, he looked in his usual happy jovial self. Out of curiosity I asked how his day was and if he did submit the homework. He jumped out of the couch with extreme excitement and asked me

“Papaaa, do you know what mam said about the homework today.?”

I was kind of confused as what I expected his mam to say was not matching with his happy emotions.

Papaa, mam said that she just loved this line "* Kindness should be done in Private and hence no pictures.” and gave me a pat on the back and a star.

I acted as if that’s what my expectation was but deep down inside both of us were feeling something very close to this.