A mom of two was left mortified after her attempts at helping her son with his math homework ended in disaster.
Roxanne Campeau from Montreal in Canada was left red-faced after her 9-year-old son Jax got his marks back from a recent math assignment.
Homework can be a struggle for kids after a busy day. The same can be said when it comes to parents helping them though.
In a survey conducted by the National Center for Families Learning, more than 60 percent of parents with children in grades K to 8 admitted they had trouble helping with their children’s homework.
Campeau takes pride in being able to offer some assistance though. “I love helping my sons with their homework,” she told Newsweek. “I take it very seriously and it gives me a gratifying feeling as a mom to know that I can help them.”
Or at least that used to be the case until a recent math homework assignment left her questioning her ability to lend a hand.
In truth, from the minute Campeau laid her eyes on the assignment she was fearing the worst. “It was math homework so already I was doomed because math is the one subject I struggled with in my youth,” she said.
The exercise asked Jax to “write how many hundreds, tens and units there are in each number.” Though there was some trepidation, Campeau offered some help in working out the answers, hopeful that her assistance would help her son get a good mark.
Unfortunately, as the video Campeau subsequently shared to TikTok under the handle @mstylesofficia3 showed, the homework came back littered with corrections from the teacher in red pen. It turned out Campeau hadn’t just got a few answers wrong on the third grade math homework—as she put it, she had given “zero good answers.”
Roxanne Campeau had helped her son with his math homework. However the mark he got back had her questioning everything.
TikTok/@mstylesofficia3
To say Campeau felt embarrassed would be something of an understatement. “Now that I see the homework corrected I feel completely stupid and ashamed because I actually thought that it was a pretty easy exercise,” she said.
Fortunately, Jax was kind about the situation and may have wanted to spare her any embarrassment. “My son was not mad, he actually didn’t say anything to me,” Campeau said. “I figured it out when I open his math book and haven’t said anything to him about it since.”
Fortunately, Campeau has been able to laugh at herself over it. “I thought it was funny even though I take it very seriously,” she said.
The experience was an “eye opener” for her though and she felt other parents out there would relate to what happened. “I do often help with my kids’ homework, I am extremely good at French and most of the other class except for math,” she said.
Like any good student, Campeau is determined to improve though and ensure she has the tools to help her sons with their work for years to come. She said: “I am now trying to find ways to help my son better by downloading an app that could help me teach at home, asking the teacher for support and also maybe get a part time tutor who could help me at home.”
For that alone, she deserves full marks.
