Child With Summer Homework Almost Ready For Final Push To Avoid It

“You have to have some backup plan, some go-to technique to deflect, distract, or delay until they get sidetracked.”

Jerusalem, August 2 – With July gone and less than a month remaining until school reopens, a local primary school student has maintained remarkable discipline regarding the assignments his teachers gave him to do during vacation, and now faced only a few weeks of continued focus to find excuses that, wouldn’t you know it, prevent him from completing the work.

Eitan Zahavi, 10, will begin fifth grade on September 1. His teachers expect him and his two dozen classmates to finish a booklet of arithmetic exercises, worksheets with reading comprehension and grammar questions, and an assortment of review materials in history, literature, and other subjects by the time the school year commences. The weeks since June 30 have seen the boy weather challenge after challenge to his rigorous schedule of not touching any of the work, including parental inquiries into his progress and eyeroll-inducing WhatsApp messages to the class from their teacher.

“It’s all about pacing,” explained Zahavi, who aspires to become a professional online gamer. “You can’t just jump into the not-doing-homework all at once. You’ll burn out after a few days, a couple of weeks at the outside if you’re lucky. Only those of us who trained hard for this during the ten-month school year are truly prepared to handle the marathon of homework-avoidance that summer vacation represents. I think maybe six other guys in the class will be able to evade this responsibility even close to a hundred percent, and one or two of those have parents who don’t care about it to begin with, so that doesn’t really count.”

Zahavi recalled several close calls this summer when one or both of his parents came close to discovering his power-shirking and were on the cusp of demanding to see his work. “I dodged a bullet a couple of times, yeah,” he acknowledged. “It’s as much an art as a skill – you have to gauge how to avoid situations where, when a parent is present, the subject of the homework comes up. You can’t assume it will never come up; you just have to have some backup plan, some go-to technique to deflect, distract, or delay until they get sidetracked.”

“I know he hasn’t done a lick of work,” admitted his father, Nir. “But it’s not about the work per se. Ask the teacher – she’s not even going to tell them to hand it in when school starts. It’s all about reminding them that they’re not truly free, that there’s always some imposed set of obligations hanging over them. Excellent preparation for life.”

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