Lynne Polvino, outraged after reading her 6-year-old daughter’s homework assignment that suggests it’s a mother’s job to stay at home, decided to rewrite the entire text. “I was already feeling pretty frazzled, and when I read the assignment, I almost lost it,” Polvino told TODAY. The worksheet featured a story called Back to Work. It asked Polvino’s first-grade daughter Hazel to choose words from word banks to complete the narrative. “Lisa was not happy,” the opening paragraph stated. “Her mother was back at work.”
“It just pushed so many buttons for me,” Polvino said. “And with each sentence it managed to get worse! 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 make their children and families unhappy? That fathers don’t normally do things like cook and wash the dishes?”
Palvino claimed she reworked the story “to reflect the kind of world I want to live in, the kind of world I want my kids to live in when they’re old enough to have jobs and families.” Although she didn’t send her text to the teacher directly, the mom voiced her concerns in an email. The teacher agreed the assignment was outdated, and promised she would review it in the future. Scroll down to compare the original to Polvino’s (who works as a children’s book editor in Manhattan) version and see if you can spot the difference.
6-year-old Hazel’s mom could not believe her eyes when she read her daughter’s homework assignment
This is the original
And here’s Polvino’s version of the text
“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 make their children and families unhappy?”
Other people were also disgusted by the worksheet and cheered Polvino’s edit
Polvino voiced her concerns to the teacher via email. She agreed the assignment was outdated and promised to review it
