“I don’t know!”

It started with a simple question. Write a synonym for each word. The words were incredibly difficult for a 2nd grader. Words like Big and Cold. But that wasn’t what was throwing my daughter into a fit of despair. She couldn’t remember what a synonym was to begin with and was feeling frustrated.

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

“Here,” I said. “Let me hel--”

“But I don’t know!”

“Let’s think ab--”

“I don’t know!”

“A synonym is--”

“I don’t know!” she screamed louder, clearly not interested in gaining any enlightenment.

“Fine,” I snapped. “Just sit there until you figure it out.”

“But I don’t know!”

I ignored her and continued school with her siblings. Five minutes of wailing and crying later, she looked ready to be taught.

“Do you need hel--?” I tried

“I don’t know!” She was back to interrupting me before I could even finish my sentence.

“If you look back on pag--”

“I don’t know!”

“Have it your way,” I rolled my eyes. “You are not getting up until you complete that page.”

“But I don’t know!”

I sighed and pointed to the page. “This one. Here. Finished.” I said.

She pouted, flounced about, fell out of her chair several times, dropped her pencil a few times more, yelled “I don’t know” once, and generally tried to get a reaction out of me without looking once at her book. I studiously ignored her, which was hard given that we were sitting right next to each other at the table.

Fifteen minutes later, I looked up from a math lesson with her brother and realized that it had been quiet for a while.

“Done!” she smiled.

I checked her work. Yup. She’d managed to not only remember what a synonym was, all on her own, but she’d also correctly filled in each blank.

Does this sound familiar to any of you? Do you have those days when your student is anything but ready to learn? I know I get frustrated with my kids sometimes because the answer is so obvious! “I’ve explained it to you ten different ways! Anything more and I’ll just be giving you the answer!”

Well, I had a little wake up check today. We took the week off of school to catch up on all the many things that there just isn’t time for during a typical week. It always starts with decluttering bedrooms. The two little girls actually hadn’t let their room reach “Let’s burn it all down and start over” proportions, but their little brother’s room? Yikes!

He’s really good at “picking up,” in that, you can send him to his room and he can get everything off the floor and onto a shelf. But organizing? He’s three and still not potty-trained, so putting things in their proper place is beyond him.

Ten minutes in and I was feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed. I had pulled everything off the shelves that didn’t belong and could no longer see the floor. I had a 13 gallon trash bag stuffed to the gills. I had a billion little pieces of a hundred different toys that needed to find each other.

Basically, I wanted to sit in the middle of the floor and scream, “I don’t know!” I don’t know how to bring order to this chaos. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to clean this up.

And as I took a few deep breaths and focused on one item at a time, it hit me. I’m an adult and I get overwhelmed by a project. The magnitude of the finished task becomes so threatening that I can’t see the little steps needed to reach completion. And I want to shut down and give up. Me. An adult.

Of course our kids are going to flip out about simple (to us) word problems and three sentence essays. It’s overwhelming and threatening. But if we give them a chance to work through their “I don’t knows” and figure out what the next step is, they’ll be able to accomplish anything they set their minds to.

​Including cleaning their own rooms.

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