How Do You Balance Homework and the Rink?

She might not get the opportunity to walk home with the boyfriend if soccer in your town is anything like soccer in my town. My oldest (not my figure skater) made the freshman soccer team. They have 2-3 games every week after school, and when there isn’t a game, there is practice from 2:30-4:30. Of course the soccer season here only runs until the end of October, but that might be enough time to get ice girl into a good pattern of coming home and getting homework done.

My figure skater is in 6th grade, so this year is going to be a little tougher with the homework issue. I’m fortunate that he’s very self motivated and will come home, have a snack, and immediately sit down to his homework. But I think this year there will be some homework done in the car on the way to and from the rink. Hopefully it doesn’t make him carsick, otherwise that’s an hour round trip that’s essentially wasted time. And since he’s also playing soccer, I think I’m going to have at least one sleep deprived kid this year, although my soccer player might be sleep deprived too, in which case it’s debatable if we’ll all survive the fall without any bloodshed.

This is definitely hard, and jumpingbean is only just starting 5th grade. She still needs a good nights sleep – like 9 pm to around 6:30 am. We are currently only doing one before school morning due to my job and travel…dh cannot do it with 2 other kids having to get to school. So many nights jumpingbean goes straight from school, changes in the car, warms up and gets on the ice by 4 pm. Ice only lasts until 6 pm before hockey takes over, then she does off ice class with her coaches until almost 7 pm. We drive the 30 minutes home (she is usually eating AND doing homework). So what are we doing? I am helping her set up a system– for example, will she always do spelling or her journal entry after breakfast before school. We are asking her teacher to help us figure out what she might be able to do on a Saturday or Sunday (like vocabulary sentences etc).

Okay….(deep breath)…Skater Grrrl just started middle school, so same problem on smaller scale.

I’m an obsessive-compulsive list maker and time charter, and hopefully my mania can be taught to my child if not genetically unlocked.

The first thing I did was make a schedule (pie charts work well, too, for those who do better with graphic representation) showing child how many hours she had in the day between waking up and falling asleep. Then, I blocked off non-negotiables (school, half-hour before bed to put on pjs-get a snack-get in bed-read, music practice, etc.)

Then we blocked off school time but showed where she had time during the school day to get homework done (library, resource, after lunch, etc.) It becomes pretty clear that if she keeps homework with her at school and gets it done there, she has more time to noodle around after school. Somehow, seeing all in color and pie slices makes it more “real” (or something). Also, in our school, kids can fill their Resource periods (i.e. study hall) with non-mandatory electives and clubs; my kid will join anything, so showing her on the chart that if she chose Film Club over study hall, that’s less skating time.

Another thing I’m going to try to enforce is that any long-term projects need to be excruciatingly mapped-out as to what gets done every night, and if you can fill weekend time with long-term projects (maybe a good time to have “homework playdates” but we haven’t tried that yet) that’s less during the week.

Ultimately though, I can’t be the Bad Cop constantly. I just had a major freak-out about that last night. It helps when Skater Grrrl sits down with me and plans this all out – then I can say, “But this is what you decided” or then present the pie chart and say, “Okay, you want to hang out on the Internet for an hour; you need to re-arrange the pieces to make them fit.” But yeah, academics come first and sometimes I have to eat hard money with no chaser and say no to skating.

We’ve already gotten rid of cable TV and most video games because they were an overall distraction to everyone in the house.

But ultimately, skating can’t be more important to me than it is to her. Academics are a non-negotiable; sleep is a non-negotiable; family chores are a non-negotiable. The rest is For Fun, no matter how much good comes of it. *sigh* I hate being the bad guy. Hate it a lot.

A possible way to get a little bit done in the car (without the carsickness) is to find out if her reading assignments for English class (those ones like when they have to read The Great Gatsby and do a book report) are available to download to the iPod as a “book on tape” and let her listen to the assigned book in the car as you are driving to and from the rink.

We have the same issues in our house. Sk8r has gotten very good at doing homework in the car with the help of book lights (we have several as well…car, book bag, and skating bag). Last year the study hall helped a little but this year it’s useless as sk8r has it first period. (There should be a mandatory study hall after math class! And really teacher do you think the kids need 25 of the same type of questions every single night? If they don’t get the concept after 5 questions they’re not going to get it after 25!) I have asked “homework heavy” teachers if they would post the homework for the following week on Friday so sk8r can get a head start on the homework on Sat. or Sunday. Not my sk8r’s favorite idea but it did help.

I graduated from undergraduate school at the University of Illinois in May 2009, and I remember the most important thing that skating during university taught me was better time management. If I saved all the homework/reading for one night and did an all-nighter, it was nearly impossible to skate well at either freestyle sessions or lessons the next day (that is, if I even made it to them, since passing out inevitably follows an all-nighter of study). I learned to plan ahead for about two weeks at a time, based on the syllabi given from professors, and planned exactly what reading I would do when, so everything would be done in order to be able to skate. If reading/preparation/papers weren’t finished, I wouldn’t skate, since GPA was more conductive to finding a job than skating skills. As a result of less ice time during those years, my skills now aren’t nearly as high as many other skaters my age, but I don’t regret missing out on that ice.

I’m currently a graduate student at Yonsei University in Seoul, and with heavy coursework, a heavy b-boy competition schedule, and a full-time computer research job, I also have to constantly plan when I can make it to the rink for freestyle or public sessions. Again, the way I see it is, my ice time might be limited right now, but at least there is money in the bank and a GPA on the rise.

My best advice is: Most schools give out free planners or agendas…Use them!

Any possibility of getting boyfriend to skate? Dance? Pairs? Just a thought.

I was pretty bad at getting the whole sleep thing done in high school. I did not have early AM practices but late night PM ones during the week (early AM on the weekends), so I would often not get home until midnight, but I would have school starting at 7am or 8am. However, my homework load was massive so I would often stay up until 2-3am to finish, even though I did get started on it right away after I came home from school. And I can’t say that I was slow either, I just had massive amounts of work to do. I was lucky because my parents knew I was motivated enough to finish my work, so we could go skating even if I was not done. And back in the day computers were much less of a distraction and although my parents watched TV high school was when I pretty much stopped (well, except Thursday night – Chinese food and TV night with no skating….). I absolutely cannot read in the car, although my sister got a lot done that way. I simply can’t do it, so that was my down time – usually that was nap time for me. And I stocked up on sleep Sunday afternoons, unless there was a competition. Then I was just plain old tired.

Undergrad college was difficult too, but I was lucky in that I got priority enrollment, so I could set my schedule such that I could still go to practice. It was a lot of work, but I think I had a more regular schedule than the rest of the college students because I was used to trying to get sleep from the high school years. Of course everyone thought I slept too much, but I was up early everyday in college (8am physics anyone?) while they slept till noon.

The first two years of graduate school are sort of crazy, but if it weren’t for the distance from the rink I think this year would be a great year for me and skating, as I can get all my work done during the day. However, the super far distance is a problem, although I am considering ways to deal with this.

ElizaA, you are very smart. Thanks! I’ll check into audio books.

Ah, Jozet. You make me smile. Ice Girl and the boyfriend went to one open skate. He lasted maybe 40 minutes.

This is excellent advice, MinSun! Ice Girl has a planner, but she doesn’t schedule for the boyfriend’s 3-hour phone calls… Working on it!

Did he put on hockey skates so he could look cool? That’s what most of the boyfriends at the rink seem to do. Even though figure skates are easier to skate in at first, for some reason they think that a toe pick is a sign of weak manhood.

But ultimately, skating can’t be more important to me than it is to her. Academics are a non-negotiable; sleep is a non-negotiable; family chores are a non-negotiable. The rest is For Fun, no matter how much good comes of it.

I couldn’t have written it better myself.

When my daughter was in middle school we expected a lot more homework – but suprisingly there wasn’t, although my daughter is very organized and would get a lot done at school. We have always had in place rules about no computer/no tv/ etc. until homework is done. And usually no phone too but we have been lax about the texting thing, she just got texting a few months ago. I have warned her that if the texting becomes an issue we will “hold” her phone for her until her homework is done. She just started high school and so far not a ton of homework but we’ll see how the year goes…. She does sometimes do homework in the car if she has a lot that day, but we usually only have a 10 min drive to the rink and maybe 15 min home (traffic) – although once a week we go to a rink that’s 20 min away, she often does homework for that trip. Luckily no car sickness here, I love the booklight idea, we will have to do that as it starts to get darker this fall. She is also aware that her continued skating time is dependant on good grades. She used to skate 2 hours a day Mon/Wed/Fri, only 1 hour on Tues, an hour and a half on some Thursdays. Now she mostly only skates one hour everyday and then goes to work out for about 45 min. the nice thing about this is that if she really has a ton of homework one night we can skip the workout. It is a fine balancing act, some kids have a lot more homework than others, some are less organized than others. I do think school should be a priority. One of my daughter’s friends who skates became so addicted to texting that her mother has to have their cell company turn off the girls texting until 3 pm each day so she wouldn’t be texting at school! I think she also has to take the girls phone away during homework time. (This girl is 16 & has a boyfriend.) I soooo do not look forward to this boyfriend stuff….

I was thinking…maybe we parents need to spin it another way.

English class: You’ll read Romeo and Juliet and you can use the knowledge to improve your artistic interpretation during your Sasha Cohen stage of skating! (Everyone goes through a Sasha Cohen stage, so I hear.)

Science: You’ll learn how to drop a leg or tighten your knees or gel your hair to increase spin speed while holding a position!

Social Studies: You’ll learn about different cultures and their arts and incorporate new, creative dance moves or get ideas for costumes and music choices! You’ll also possibly gain some historical background knowledge which will help you understand why some people both fear and admire Russian coaches, although know one knows for sure why the Swiss are such good spinners.

Math: Have you tried to figure out how to put together a level-4 spin without repeating elements on the same foot, unless of course it’s a spin in one position on one foot, minus the back entry you already used, plus 8 rotations with a variable GOE for your interesting hand positions? Yeah…you’ll need Calc II at least.

Music: No brainer.

Shop class: How to sharpen blades.

Gym: Possibly redundant, although if you can get in some yoga or gymnastics, jumping (volleyball), plyometrics (dodge ball), and good sportsmanship/humility (locker room), it’s worth it.

Last year was my junior year in high school. I am in a very advanced and fast-paced academic curriculum at school, so I got a lot of homework. I also skated four afternoons a week, every weekday but Tuesday. I would go home from school, change, go to the rink, and then not get home until 7ish, when I would eat dinner and start homework. Doing homework in the car was not an option for me, since I drive myself to and from the rink. I learned that I had to work pretty quickly and stay on task really well when I sat down to do my homework or I wouldn’t get much sleep that night. Luckily, my school has a block schedule, which means we don’t have all of our classes every day. This meant that sometimes, I could weait on math homework if I had too much english and history homework since I didn’t have math the next day.

The bad news about all of this was that I was often stressed and tired, and I didn’t have as much of a social life as I would have liked, which has been mentioned by a lot of other commenters on here. On the other hand, I always seemed to spend less time on my homework than my friends while still getting the same amount done because I didn’t have the time to waste on Facebook and the internet that my friends did. I also really liked that my parents didn’t nag me at all about homework. They know that I hold myself to a very high standard (I chose my difficult classes myself) and they know that if I don’t get my homework done, I will feel worse about it than they could make me feel by berating me.

I would suggest trying this strategy with IceGirl if she is someone who likes to be independent. Explain to her that she can be in charge of her timing and homework, but if her grades start to slip, she will have to cut back on ice time. If she’s like me, the thought of no ice will make her sit down and do her homework on her own time and you won’t have to worry about nagging by phone.

Thank you! The planner was difficult to remember to use every day at first, but it gets a lot easier the more you use it!

I do that too Honestly I don’t love listening to books but if I can catch some extra off-ice practice by running and getting other stuff done by listening to the book I’ll do it.

I think that’s really wise, synchmomto2. When Ice Girl was in gymnastics, I worked out a system with her grade school teachers so she could have the homework a day ahead of time. That way, gymnastics nights were stress-free.

Now that she’s in high school, though, it’s a different story. She has ice on Monday nights and ballet on Wednesday nights. The rest of the days are 6 a.m.s. I’ve also made sure she has a study hall every day. I just hope she uses it!

Ice Mom

Hi, Lynne.

Soccer season only lasts until the beginning of October here. She wants to skip ballet to go to his games, though. That’s going to be a question for Ice Coach, I think.

For me, this has all been a choice thing. She’s on a punch card for ballet, so I’m not losing money if she doesn’t go. If she chooses the boyfriend’s soccer game instead, that’s fine. It’s her decision.

Of course, I think it’s not smart, but she’s a freshman. That’s how they roll.

I can’t believe your figure skater is also playing soccer! You’re going to be one tired mom!

Two weeks into the last year of middle school and we’re trying to iron this one out! Right now it’s an hour past lights out, and she’s still working on homework. Today we decided to try a different approach – to avoid rush hour, we stayed at the rink (the rink we were at has a study lounge)… that won’t work. Too many distractions! Car studying is definitely going to have to come into play this year. 1/2 hour each way to/from rink is a lot of homework time!

I think you should just duct tape Ice Girls cellphone to the fridge (taping IG to her chair is optional). Also, get her Facebook password and change it.

It’s hard, isn’t it? And that stupid social life keeps getting in the way, too.

That’s the great
article! I just pass ‘n read it, two thumbs up!