I Feel Left Behind.

Sigh.
During the next two weeks my oldest son has two weeks of constant testing courtesy of President Bush's No Student Left Behind policy. I assumed during this time of testing, (Since apparently the test last all day) there would be little or no homework for Ethan.
I was wrong. He spent some time with his Mom yesterday. When he came home around 5, I asked if he had any homework. He said Yeah and I told I'd help him if he needed it after I finished cooking dinner. So around 5.45 or 6, I sat down and looked at his "little" homework.
He had three separate math pages totaling 65 questions. He also had two practice test to help him with today's test. This totaled over 40 questions I believe. He also had some weird English -Math hybrid homework that he need to do.
I thought to myself, "Ok no problem . It's 5th grade problems. I did that like 28 years ago." We started doing the homework with the Simpson's playing in the background. I soon turned it off. These were fairly hard problems. Ethan looked more and more frustrated. A few times he looked like he was about to cry. A few times I wanted to cry.
It was when Ethan got to this question that his head exploded.

"Suppose that you are planning to paint the walls of a
living room with two coats of paints. A gallon of
paint covers about 400 to 425 square feet with one
coat. The room measures 16 feet by 24 feet, and the
ceiling is about 7 1/2 feet high. There are 4 windows
in the room each measuring 33 inches by 48 inches. The
room also has two door ways that each measure 36
inches by 81 inches. How many gallons of paint should
you buy? Describe how you figured the amount."
This was like question 25 on the practice tests. Another 15 like this lay ahead. And after that 65 more on his "regular" homework! We finished up around 9.15. Ethan looked very tired. I told him, "Only two more weeks of this to go."
Much to my surprise he did not run off and join the circus last night while I slept.


And yes ,......I got the answer to that question wrong.