Family Filing Fiasco

    The other day I ran into significant stressor for my Japanese husband that was utterly bizarre to me.

    When I was in grade school, lots of homework and graded papers were handed back to students, but the only reason to keep them was in case your teacher lost your grade somehow and you needed to prove that you had done the work. Occasionally an assignment would be graded, revised, and turned in again, but this was rare even in high school.

I feel you, drawing of a scared girl, but for paperwork more than zombies.

    My daughter now is in second grade and for her school there are files she is meant to bring home and maintain. Every day the graded papers she brings home are supposed to be filed in the appropriate location. At the end of every semester, she has to bring files back so that it can be checked again for some reason. I'm not entirely sure what the point is other than forcing the kids to do paperwork at a young age. Nevertheless, we tried to keep up somewhat with the filing in her first year, but with the pandemic going we had enough stress without having to care too explicitly about paperwork.

    Since April, I've been asking my daughter to do her filing and she has been neglecting to bother with it. This is one area where I don't put my foot down as hard, probably because I don't really get the point. I know it needs to be turned in and I know she needs to do it, but in a more immediate way, she needs to finish her dinner and get ready for bed. Those daily fights are worth my energy as they are absolutely necessary. Sleeping and eating are imperative to survival. Paperwork? Not so much. 

    Apparently it's a big enough deal to my husband that it required a two-hour long middle-of-the-night discussion, culminating with him pilling all of the paper that needs to be filed on the couch for her to be forced to reckon with in the morning. All this really did was force me to use other spaces to fold the laundry and sit during the week that I have been waiting for either of them to do the work.

    To his credit, when he came home the next day, after she had finished her homework, he took the time to sort and file half of the paperwork with her in a kindly fatherly manner.

    The other half still waits on my couch.

    Does anyone else find this filing stuff needlessly tedious?