Home HomeWork

Education was such an important part of my family culture. 

It had created so many opportunities for my parents and my grandparents its power was proven to be reliable.

My grandfather wrote his math problems on the dirt floor of his parents farm hut in Sri Lanka.

A couple of decades later, his daughter would go to Harvard. 

Education was everything. 

So every opportunity we got, my parents would try and give us the edge in educational opportunities. 

It was around Year 3 or Year 4 when Mum decided that the homework we got from school wasn’t good enough. 

She came at my primary school teachers with the same “I know better” energy anti-vaxxers come at health professionals. My child, my choice. 

So my Mum started us on what became known in our household as Home-Homework. Home-homework was the extra homework we got assigned by our parents, after we’d already finished our school homework. 

Back when bookstores hadn’t been crushed by the market pressures created by online retailers, You could go into Angus and Robertson and buy these English and Math exercise books that were graded at different levels. 

Often these books had a page of math and a page of english activities. Exactly what every growing future physician needs to succeed. 

Every night after I’d finished my homework from school, I’d have to complete a page of extra math and english work.

If I’m honest about the experience, the work was kind of fine. But I hated doing this extra work because I knew that no one else I knew at school had to do it.

Every time I’d argue with my parents about it - ‘why do I have to do this? My friends get to do their 20 minutes of homework and then they get to watch the Simpsons.’ 

I don’t understand why we have to be different. 

But every time I would complain they’d tell me how lucky I had it compared to my cousins who lived in Sydney. 

She’d tell me that my cousins had it way worse, going straight from school to spending hours in extra academic classes. 

For white people that might be unaware, in Sydney, they have these after school programs where kids get extra tutoring in order to start learning quantum mechanics instead of watching Rugrats. 

But the whole thing is a complete secret. The competition is so fierce, no one wants to tell other people how hard they are working. It’s like an academic Fight Club. 

That’s why whenever I asked my cousins, they never really talked about it. There was this unspoken rule that you never really talked about studies. If you gave away your process, you gave away your advantage. 

Right now, as I share these trade secrets Aunties and Uncles all over the world are going crazy on Whatsapp group messages. 

I got glimpses of that mindset when I’d spend school holidays in Sydney. My cousins would be out all day at these programs, while I sat at my grandparents house in Blacktown, watching Sound of Music on VHS and playing Pokemon Sapphire on my Gameboy SP. 

I think if I had grown up in the Western Suburbs, I wouldn’t have resented home-homework as much, because at least I knew other people were going through the same thing. 

But being in Newcastle, away from any kind of competitive form of academic tutoring - it was harder to wrap my head around, it felt unfair. 

People would ask me what I did over the weekend, and outside of playing Saturday morning sport and going to church on Sunday morning there were often two afternoons worth of study activities that I felt like I couldn’t share with anyone. 

Not because I was ashamed and not because I wanted the competitive advantage, but purely because I knew they couldn’t really relate. 

I’m sure there were plenty of kids doing extra work on the weekends around where I lived, but if there were, I sure didn’t know about it. 

That’s why growing up I always wanted white parents. They would have never made me do home-homework. Most don’t even know what home-homework is. 

Earlier this year, when I married my wife, I got my very own set of white parents. And I’m proud to declare, not once have they made me do any home-homework.

My predictive logic was right! I’m so smart.

Probably because of all the home-homework I did as a child.