Read this New York Times essay on why Parental Involvement Is Overrated and weep for all the time you spent helping your child become well-educated. It doesn’t help that
“most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children at homework.”
Many a time my kids asked me to help them do math, which I really dreaded—not because I could not come up with the answer, but due to the constantly-changing way schools taught it. After being told many times that I got the right answer the wrong way and thus provided absolutely no help, I began bearing down on studying the latest-and-greatest math book first before working out the problem.
By the way, I made the student go through the materials with me—that made this an effective approach for parental mentoring, or so I thought. Now I wonder if I should’ve even bothered.
However, one time one of my daughters did say that my way of explaining a puzzling math problem made a lot more sense the either the teacher or the book. That’s one time out of hundred other times that my good deeds did not go unpunished, but like the single outstanding golf shot out of hundred bad ones in any-given round, I remember this fondly. 🙂