While a simple school worksheet may seem innocent enough, one parent decided to rewrite the assignment, changing the narrative from a negative experience of a mother returning to work to a positive one.
Lynne Polvino was helping her 6-year-old daughter Hazel with her homework last week when she noticed something troubling with the assignment, an unfortunate and increasingly common problem thanks to outdated curriculums.
So, Polvino decided to make some changes to the assignment with an updated narrative.
The worksheet is a fill-in-the-blank style assignment which follows a story of a mother returning to work. The first line reads, "Lisa was not happy. Her mother was back at work."
Basically, the story centres on a little girl named Lisa, who has a terrible day because her mother is finally returning to work after leaving to raise her child. To top it off, the girl's father is bad at cooking. How cliche.
"It just pushed so many buttons for me, and with each sentence it managed to get worse!" Polvino told Today.
"My shock and dismay quickly turned to outrage. I mean, what decade are we in, anyway? In this day and age, we're going to tell kids that mothers working outside the home makes their children and families unhappy? That fathers don't normally do things like cook and wash the dishes?"
According to Polvino, Hazel wasn't too fazed by the story, and was more focused on finding the right words to fill in the blank, but it bothered Polvino.
While the experience of a parent returning to work can be a big adjustment for a kid, Plovino decided to rewrite the assignment into a positive story that more accurately portrays the life she wants for her children.
Read the full story here.