A Wonderful Discovery Sarah had a son of ten, called Jack. He did not like studying, but loved watching TV. Sarah used to drive to school at half past four in the afternoon, bring Jack back home and give him his tea, but as soon as he got into the house, he always rushed to the TV set and turned it on.
‘Haven’t you got any homework, Jack?’ his mother always asked him as she began to make the tea.
‘Eh? Oh, yes, I’ve got a little,’ he used to answer. ‘I’ll do it later when there is nothing interesting on TV.’
At first Sarah allowed Jack to watch TV instead of doing his homework first, but she soon discovered that he never had a little homework — it was always a great deal — and that there was never a time when there was nothing interesting on TV, so after putting off doing his homework for a couple of hours, Jack was too tired to do his homework properly, if at all.
Sarah then decided to make him do homework first. This was always a battle, and often when Jack obeyed his mother, he did the work quickly and carelessly in order to finish it and get back to his beloved TV.
The result was the same — bad work, for which he usually got low marks the next day at school, either because his homework was full of mistakes, or because he did not know the work he was supposed to have prepared the night before.
One evening Jack’s science homework was about famous scientists like Thomas Edison, who made important discoveries and inventions in the field of electricity. When he had homework that consisted of learning facts, his mother usually tested him when he finished, to make sure that he had really done the work properly and not left anything out, and this is what she did this time. She didn’t let him stop until she was sure that he knew what was in his book.
But this time it was less of a fight than usual to make Jack sit down and do his homework carefully, because it had a strong connection with television.
In class the next day, the teacher asked Jack, ‘What are some of the things that Thomas Edison did for science?’
‘Well,’ Jack answered happily, ‘first of all, if it weren’t for Edison, we’d all be watching TV by candlelight!’ |