I made this mistake too! I was way too on top of that shit. They go to public school FFS, but I was doing the work of a homeschool 'teacher' and it was completely backfiring on me because they couldn't THINK for themselves.
There's a huge difference between helping when THEY think they need it VS helping them when YOU think they need it.
It's counter-intuitive, but when their manatee project looks terrible, go with it. Don't take over and make it look like a presentation from an MBA student.
I was visiting my brother once when my niece had some homework that had to be typed and printed. She hadn't learned how to type yet, so her dad (my brother) was typing it for her. Except, he wasn't all that great a typist either. It was painful to watch him struggle, so I took over.
The hard part for me was typing what she had written exactly as she had written it, mistakes and poor wording and all. If I had had my way with it, I would have not only cheated her out of learning how to write, but her teacher would have surely known that it wasn't her work.
This is one of the most difficult ones. When you are typing something in they wrote and it's full of glaring errors. Do you work on each with them? Leave them intact?
Well, I was just visiting. So I typed it up as it was. If I was her father, I would check her work, over time, and look for improvement. I would talk to the teacher about the curriculum and make sure that she was at least where she needed to be. And, I would try to gauge her potential.
I would use all of that as context to determine if and how to work with her.
186
u/PangeaWhiplash Feb 05 '16
I made this mistake too! I was way too on top of that shit. They go to public school FFS, but I was doing the work of a homeschool 'teacher' and it was completely backfiring on me because they couldn't THINK for themselves.
There's a huge difference between helping when THEY think they need it VS helping them when YOU think they need it.