A brief history of homework, with an accent on 'home'

Even though I had gone through grades 1-3 in Catholic school, I hadn’t experienced punitive homework until I was a fourth-grader.

That was a minefield — new town, new classmates, new teacher.

It started when the no-nonsense nun running the show refused to call me “Mike” because, she said, three boys with the same first name in one room was one too many; thus, I’d be called “Stanley.”

This, as faithful readers may recall, triggered in Mom the confrontational side of her maternal instinct, and the result of their tense summit was the clumsy but acceptable “S. Michael.”

That collision with authority was just the first in an exhausting battle of wills that would last until the school finally spat me out after eighth grade: wearing penny loafers, letting my hair grow, giving my I.D. bracelet to a girl … it was always something.

Anyway, the headstrong sister got all ticked off — who can remember what bit of disobedience wrinkled her wimple? — and, one Friday afternoon, she assigned me what she called a “task.”

I had to write “I must obey” 100 times on a piece of paper and turn it in Monday morning, as if it were a real homework assignment. I remember telling Mom about the whole thing, and she just laughed.

“Get it over with,” she advised, “but use your best penmanship.”

Speaking of my mother, she assisted me with an inordinate amount of homework, something she always volunteered to do, and I sort of got used to. Was it wrong? Well, that depends on your definition.

I prefer to think of her contributions as more like a guiding hand, what they call “teachable moments” these days. Spelling, syntax, grammar, subject-verb agreement: these were her strengths.

I’d come up with an idea, hang some slabs of inert verbiage from the skeleton and then stand back as Mom created a living entity. All through grade school and, to a lesser extent, high school, this was a workable formula, but then I took it to another level entirely.

In the fall of my senior year in college, I didn’t give a fig about anything. My on-again, off-again girlfriend remained maddeningly out of reach, I’d gotten busted for weed, my bike had two flat tires and by the time I staggered home for Thanksgiving, I was a mess.

Long story short: Mom and my favorite aunt rescued me by typing up my term paper on Madame Toussaud’s Wax Museum, a burden I’d lugged around for three months with only a Hunter Thompson-like mishmash of semi-coherent drafts, annotated copies of ancient articles and a few irrelevant photographs to show for my efforts.

It — like me — was an ugly, hideous train wreck. I was hardly home at all that holiday weekend, descending further into my well of self-pity and debauchery; meanwhile, Mom and her sister-in-law lashed together a perfectly organized, well-reasoned and solid treatise on the importance of the famed London landmark.

Weeks after I’d submitted their work as my own, I got an A-minus for their 40 pages. The professor’s only criticism was that my topic “was not important enough” for the nature and scope of the project.

That was nonsense, as he’d green-lighted the idea in September.

No matter. The lingering memory is that Mom was so proud.

“I got an A-minus at Notre Dame!” she’d sometimes say, beaming.

She kept a copy on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, an artifact I found only after she’d died. The thought of it still makes me smile.

Allow me one final homework story to close out this assignment.

In the fall of 1969, I started ninth grade, my first exposure to the public school system. The transition from the cozy Catholic cocoon involved accommodating myself to lockers, homerooms, migrating from classroom to classroom and girls in miniskirts.

For me, it was the second different school in what would become a dizzying three-year span, and that was disorienting. The junior high was a crumbling, proud old edifice that was so huge, so disturbingly foreign, that it took some time to plot my course.

But once I got used to the idea of starting my day in a rather freewheeling biology class before being funneled directly into the phys ed torture chamber, I found a little rhythm, then a bit of grit.

Biology was such a cool environment since the teacher was a progressive educator with more than a small streak of rebellion.

Take a frog dissection. He encouraged us kids to wield our scalpels with studious abandon, instructing us in the proper way to scrape away at the skull in order to expose the glistening prefrontal lobes.

To paraphrase Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now,” I loved the smell of formaldehyde in the morning. It smelled like … learning.

Biology class was always a hands-on experience, and nowhere was that more evident than in his spring wildflower assignment, which involved sending all of us into the vast world to collect and collate as many specimens as possible as we traipsed far and wide.

He organized a couple of group trips and encouraged us to explore the woods and fields near our neighborhoods. It was a great thing, that outdoor quest/assignment, and I learned quite a lot from it.

By the end, having scoured the town creek, the country club tree line, neighbors’ yards, the cemetery and a few parks, I had an even 100 species, pressed and labeled, housed in a three-ring binder.

May apple, Jacob’s Ladder, bluebells, spring beauties, bellwort, phlox, nightshade, cowslips, buttercups … a staggering assortment.

My only regret was that I was unable to track down the elusive red trillium, but that’s only kept me looking for years since, and some day, perhaps this spring back home again, I’ll finally find one.

I’ll refrain from uprooting it, though, leaving it for others to enjoy.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where all our tests are of the open-book variety.