Life with Liz: Read the directions

It has been noted on multiple occasions that helping the kids with the math homework is not exactly my favorite pastime.

Sunday night, after two days of denying they had any homework, both G and E “suddenly” remembered that they had math homework to finish. Sunday nights are my “me” time, when I lock myself in the laundry room with my iron, a pile of school uniforms, and a Netflix series to binge on, so I was already not thrilled to disrupt my routine, let alone for math.

E definitely needed more help than G, so I dragged the Wonderful Husband into the fun, and we tag teamed. About five minutes in, G hit me with a complicated graphing problem.

I always start by having them read the problem out loud to me. I’m amazed at how frequently taking the time to read the problem again, they can figure out what had them stumped in the first place. This time, that didn’t help. In fact, the more G read it, the more confused we both became.

Stuck in between dueling fourth-and sixth-grade homework, I told him to skip that one, move on, and when it was quieter, we’d come back to that one. I was hoping something in subsequent problems would help him figure that tricky #9 out on his own.

Half an hour later, E was on her way to bed, and it was just G and I in the kitchen. Frustration was high. I took the math book and looked at the problem. It definitely seemed to be missing something, so I flipped to the previous page. Lo and behold, there was another set of directions: Use the graph below to answer questions 7-9. As soon as I read that line, G grabbed the book and within minutes had the problem solved correctly, on his own.

I was more than a little perturbed that he’d wasted so much time and created so much frustration just because he hadn’t read the instructions in their entirety. After the homework was put away, he had to endure another lecture about the importance of reading instructions. “Yes, Mom, I knowwwwwwww,” he moaned. “No, clearly you don’t know, or we wouldn’t have sat here banging our heads for half an hour,” I snapped.

My kids are no strangers to the quiz one of my teachers gave us in elementary school. It was a piece of paper with about 30 lines of instructions on it. The final instruction was to go back and follow the first direction, which was to put your name on the paper, and then put your pencil down. The other 29 lines of direction were not to be followed. I quickly erased all the little doodles that the other directions had said to make and learned my lesson about the importance of reading all the directions before starting a project.

Being a baking enthusiast has also taught me the importance of following directions and reading them thoroughly before starting the execution of a recipe. I learned at a young age to collect all the items needed for the recipe, including ingredients, pans, measuring utensils, spoons, etc. There is nothing more irritating than getting halfway through a recipe and then finding out that you should have melted the butter or sifted the flour.

Recently, I’ve noticed that more and more people seem to be forsaking instruction manuals or directions. A few weeks ago, we were at one of the kids’ meets or matches. The event lineup was all keyed into a computer system, which happened to be malfunctioning. One of the parents knew I was familiar with the software and asked me if I would mind looking at it. While it wasn’t a problem I’d seen before, I accessed the software’s help manual, and was able to troubleshoot the problem within a few minutes. Afterward, the system operator asked me how I knew how to fix the problem. I was honest, I told him I didn’t know, but searched for the problem in the help manual and was able to figure it out. He hadn’t even noticed the “help” tab in the main screen menu.

In some ways, “help” has never been easier to find. I can’t begin to count how many home improvement projects have started with a simple Google “how to” search. I’ve learned better ways to strip paint, lay flooring, even install light fixtures. And, for those who struggle turning written words into actions, there are always plenty of step by step how-to clips on YouTube.

All that being said, I have no doubt I’m going to have another round of homework where someone didn’t read the directions. And, of course, it will carry over on to tests, when I am not there to gently remind, or beat them over the head with the need to read. It seems like it’s a hard lesson to learn.

In this day of information overload, it’s easy to just skim or skip and it carries over from directions, to emails, to online warranties, to the fine print of service agreements, to online articles about the perils of not reading directions.

Is it human nature to just assume that we know everything already, or are at least smart enough to figure it out? Is it just a personality quirk of some people to want to be thorough and plan while others just like to wing it? I guess I’m just trying to figure out if this is a lesson my kids are going to learn in the near future, or it’s a trait that’s going to drive me crazy for the rest of my life. If only kids came with an instruction manual. …

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.