This is a letter about late nights, raw nerves and imaginative invention. In other words, this letter is about parental torture, otherwise known as homework.
Never having brought up children in the land of the Emerald Tiger, I have no idea how much homework Irish primary school children are expected to do. What I can say is that their contemporaries in international schools in Italy are expected to do a lot of it, indeed probably only fractionally less than the average Leaving Cert student sitting 17 honours exams.
In our case, there is a good reason why 10-year-old Roisin tends to have a lot of homework. Her school, American Overseas, offers a double programme that covers both the Italian state curriculum (scuola elementare) and an English-language primary education.
For the majority of non-Italian parents, who only remain a few years in Italy before moving on to their next assignment, an Italian education is irrelevant. Roisin's case is different since she was born in Rome and has lived all her life here. She is bilingual. For her, and for us, it is important that she learns to read and write in Italian as effectively as in English. And there's the rub.
In effect, Roisin has two sets of homework a week, with Italian language, history, geography and mathematics added on to the rest of her English-based school programme. For traffic reasons, she leaves the house at 7 a.m. to return at about 6 p.m., and extra homework can make a long day even longer.
You might argue that maths, composition, grammar, geography and history all form part of a basic curriculum anywhere. The real killer, though, is the "project". This can involve anything from rigging up a true-to-scale model of the Coliseum or an Egyptian shaduf to rewriting the history of an entire Italian region.
The "project" can often begin with an innocent sounding question from the back seat on the way home from school such as: "Mammy, can you make me a lace bonnet for tomorrow because I'm going to be a Pilgrim Mother [on the Mayflower]?" or: "Mammy, I have to dress up as a literary character tomorrow. Now I was thinking of Rapunzel . . ."
The absurd thing about the "project" is that while it seems destined to involve everyone from parents to the local plumber, the children tend to be idle bystanders. I recall one fellow father who used to get into a royal sweat every year the "Egg Mobile" race came around.
He was a flying enthusiast and would spend hours working late into the night trying to create a flying "EggMobile". If his nine-year-old daughter moved to touch the invention, he would become apoplectic and scream at her to leave it alone, notwithstanding the fact that the said invention would be presented in school next day as "her" work. The same father would regularly get annoyed if his "EggMobile" failed to win a prize.
Recently, Roisin designed a Roman amphitheatre as part of a project on ancient Rome. Correction, recently Roisin and her mother designed an amphitheatre. Long after Roisin was asleep, her mother would be found toiling over the infernal contraption, caught up in a flurry of staplers, glue, heavy paper, ill temper and bad language.
Other children (and perhaps their parents) proved remarkably inventive, with one 10-year-old reproducing a Roman aqueduct complete with electricity and running water. Some 10-year-olds are very smart.
At a party the other night, the "project" was a major topic of conversation, with several mothers confessing candidly that they did all the research and construction themselves. Most of them justified this work "procedure" by saying that the children had "helped a lot" adding that the children had too much other homework to devote much time to the project.
If the project can seem designed to test parental powers of invention rather than those of the child, other aspects of dual-language homework can also prove challenging.
For example, the Italian system lays solid and sensible emphasis on the old-fashioned virtues of grammar and parsing. This is all very well until you come up against the complimento diretto and the complimento indiretto, with the latter a peculiar beast which has begat something like 12 different modalities.
For instance, in Italian maths, the decimal point is not a point but rather a comma and long division is . . . but that really is too long a story.
There are, of course, moments of consolation and compensation. Reading through Roisin's history book helps fill some yawning knowledge gaps. The other day, for example, I came across a reference to the illuminista Cesare Beccaria who as far back as 1764 in a book entitled Dei Delitte e delle Pene (Of Crimes and their Punishment) proposed the abolition of capital punishment. That led on to reflections on the deeply rooted nature of the contemporary widespread Italian rejection of capital punishment, a rejection often directed against the use of the death sentence in the US.
Well, at least, I learned something. I hope Roisin did, too.