Mum's Holiday Homework

By Qurratul-Ain Haider

Karen Gupta, 45, snatches a few minutes from her household chores. But it's not prime time TV that pulls her away from adding the finishing touches to the family dinner. It's the Internet. More precisely a website on the functions of the internal organs of the human body.

Meghna Sareen, 38, has missed four sessions of her power yoga classes just so that she can meet up with a few other mums and snip newspaper cuttings on global warming.

Meher Abidi, 34, glances at her watch. It's been a long day at work but she still has plenty of paper work at home - sticking images on her daughter's colouring sheet to create a story, before the family leaves for its summer vacation two days later.

Karen, Meghna and Meher are just a few of the hundreds of women with school-going children, who are rushing to complete the long list of projects, assignments and reports that make up the portfolio of holiday homework their children have brought home.

For most mothers, the summer holidays can stretch on like a piece of painfully un-detachable Hubba Bubba chewed gum. Yet, what makes the agony worse is not the heat wave and power failures that package the long vacation but the insurmountable amount of 'creative' homework children need to complete before school reopens.

With the unwritten code that homework is to be attended to under parental guidance - like some near-adult film - the summer holidays end up bringing out the best in mothers ('worst' is the term kids would use!), as they surf the Internet, make charts, spiral-bind projects and rummage through mounds of old newspapers for clippings on topics such as the swine flu. Despite their own pressing chores and careers, mothers conscientiously grapple with 'their' deadlines, before schools re-open. "It has taken me a fortnight to gather information on water bodies... and that includes two days of casual leave to download pictures and burn a CD - a first for me," complains Gupta, whose son is in Class IV at a leading school in Delhi's Vasant Kunj.

However, going by the rather organized manner in which schools have disseminated homework, the assignments shouldn't be much of a problem to deliver. Most have given subject-wise assignments - around three at least per subject - with the tasks printed or uploaded on their websites.

But if that's the case, what is all the fuss about - and the need for this rather heart-felt article now in your hands? Well, the crux of the issue is the explosive cocktail of an overdose of assignments; stress on decorative and packaged projects; and the maternal sentiment that children should have time to enjoy their summer break.

Neena Mehta, 39, runs a busy salon in Mayur Vihar in East Delhi. Between offering the best haircuts in the neighborhood, to looking after her family of four, she has very little time to spare. However, most of her evenings are now spent supervising her daughter, as she attempts to complete her homework. "Ours is a nuclear family. My husband travels on work. This means I am the only one Meha, who is in Class VII, can approach for help. After the many worksheets of Maths and Science, she still had a 'nazam' (poem) to pen in Urdu. This is her first year of learning the new language and I don't know the language at all, so I have asked a Muslim friend to write it for us."

So does that mean the pressure to complete homework compels mothers to cross the fine line between mere supervision and complete ownership? Shivani Mittal, whose daughters Brinda and Aditi study in Class X and IV, respectively, of Carmel Convent, New Delhi, firmly believes in only supervision. Mothers should encourage children to "explore their creativity" though the holiday assignments, she says and adds, "I don't put pressure on them. It has to be their own work." So little Aditi has had to ask the local chemist on her own on what to include in a first aid kit, and also browse through the magazines for images on classical Indian dance forms.

But Sangeeta Bhatnagar whose son studies at Delhi Public School (DPS), Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, knows the agony of pending homework. She has spent one summer trying to make a three-dimensional model on earth pollution. "My kindergarten-going son was too young to do anything. Those few days, we survived on bread and omelet for meals as most of my time was devoted to the project. Fortunately, for mothers like her, the school's principal responded favorably to the parents' feedback. The children now have manageable homework that is course-related, such as reading the works of Rabindranath Tagore.

Richa Shukla, whose son Aditya is in Class VII at Modern School, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi, feels that while creative homework is interesting - she is assisting Aditya in making an ideal dummy Hindi newspaper by pasting newspaper articles on A3 sheets - course-related work has more to offer. Compared to the story that he had to string together with his limited vocabulary of Sanskrit, Richa feels that children get more out of projects like the one on rotational symmetry (Maths). A working mother, she has already charted out a schedule, as she wants the homework to be completed before the family leaves for their outstation trip.

While innovative projects do help children evolve as they learn to source and sift though information, it is the working models that can throw mothers into a tizzy, with some describing them as "useless". Alka Mitta, mother of Rohan, a Class VIII student of DPS, Mathura Road, New Delhi, believes that holiday homework should encourage children to learn new things that they otherwise would have no time for." I know of a student doing a survey on electronic waste disposal, which I thought was quite thought provoking." However, she fails to find the justification for handwritten projects in an age of computers.

Then again, is there any justification for holiday homework at all? At a time when children would like to simply "chill out", "hang out" or "stay out", why give any tasks at all. Says Shamama Baqar, Vice Principal, City Montessori School, Chowk Branch, Lucknow, "Holiday homework keeps children constructively engaged, preventing them from whiling away their time on Facebook (online social networking site) and with their I-pods and the television - in the absence of outdoor activities." Baqar, however, says that homework should encourage learning and the ability to read and gather information rather than focusing on the decorating of projects and charts.

But for the many mothers traumatized by the amount of homework, there is relief in the form of professional 'home workers', who offer to make that working model of the solar heater - complete with water and copper pipes or the thermacol volcano or the CD on endangered species - all for a fee that seems more affordable, even though unethical, when translated into the currency of stressful labor.

Says South Delhi-based Gurpeet Kohli, who has been churning out homework projects for over a decade, "Basically, mothers find sourcing the material and apparatus needed to put together a project difficult. I have a team of 12 people - from a carpenter to two artists to the local fridge mechanic - who I tap to put together projects. I have over 3,000 concepts to offer students. From charts to spiral-bound assignments to working models - nothing is a problem."

Seems like strong words of reassurance for mothers, even though the basic purpose behind honest, creative holiday assignments may have just got lost behind the layers of glue, paper and maternal anxiety.