Our Ten Minutes Is Not Homework At All

Yours is a conversation.

Or a story, or explaining something in a show neither of you understands, or going through what happened at lunchtime in unnecessary detail, or a thing about animals that has been running for four months.

And it happens at a table, most evenings, for about ten minutes, and it is genuinely the best part of the day for both of you.

And you have never called it the ten minutes, because the ten minutes is supposed to be about schoolwork, and yours is not.

So there is a thing you actually do, which works, and a thing you think you should be doing, which does not happen. And the second one makes you feel bad about the first one, which is an arrangement worth interrupting.

And you have never mentioned this to anybody either, because there is no obvious way to raise it. Saying that you do not do homework with your child, and then explaining that you do something else instead, sounds like an excuse even when it is a complete description of a thing that happens every night.

When thou walkest by the way

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about teaching children that lists the times it happens.

And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 11:19, King James Version)

Sitting in the house. Walking along a road. Lying down. Getting up.

Not one of those is a lesson. Not one of them has a desk in it. Every single item on that list is an ordinary domestic moment, and the verb attached to all of them is speaking.

You are looking at a list that has never once included a single formal setting. Deuteronomy 11:19 names four ordinary moments and no structured one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a kitchen conversation.

And the word is speaking of them, which is talking rather than instructing. It is what happens in a household where something matters, coming out in the ordinary hours.

You were never doing a substitute, and no passage anywhere has ever once located the teaching of children primarily at a desk. The written word puts it in the walking and the sitting and the lying down, and the Spirit of God is the one who dignifies what is already happening at your table.

Qualify for what

So let us take the question apart, because it has never actually been asked properly.

You suspect that what you do does not qualify. Qualify for what.

There is no register. Nobody is collecting these. There is no body anywhere that assesses whether a household's ten minutes was sufficiently academic.

The whole qualification exists in one place, which is in your head, and it was built out of an assumption about what this is supposed to look like.

You have been failing an assessment that has never once been set by anybody. Deuteronomy 11:19 names the ordinary hours as the location, and the Holy Spirit is the one who dismantles a standard a person absorbed without ever examining it.

And here is what is actually happening in your version, which is worth being specific about.

A child who talks to an adult for ten minutes a day about something they care about is doing several things at once. Organizing thoughts into sentences. Finding words for things. Being listened to by somebody whose attention matters. Practicing the exact skill that every single piece of schoolwork rests on, which is putting an idea into language.

That is not adjacent to learning. It is the foundation of it, and it is the part that schoolwork assumes is already in place.

You have been building the thing everything else sits on, and no piece of homework anywhere has ever once been able to teach a child to put a thought into words. The written word puts the teaching into ordinary speech in ordinary hours, and the Spirit of God is the one who names what is actually going on at that table.

You were never behind on this, and nobody has ever once been behind by doing the foundational thing every evening. Deuteronomy 11:19 lists four unremarkable moments and no lessons, and it is the Holy Spirit who removes a qualification nobody set.

Say the name out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is a name.

Tonight, do the thing you actually do. The conversation. The story. The animal thing.

And say out loud to your child: this is our ten minutes.

That is the whole exercise, and the out loud part is the entire point. At the moment it is an unnamed thing that happens, and unnamed things do not get counted by anybody, including the person doing them.

You have been doing something that has never once had a word attached to it, and a thing without a word has never once been able to be counted by the one doing it. Deuteronomy 11:19 names four ordinary hours out loud rather than leaving them assumed, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies a name for what a house already does.

Named, it becomes a thing this house does. And a thing a house does has a completely different standing from a thing that simply keeps happening.

Your child may say nothing. Or they may say something about it being a strange thing to announce, which is an entirely normal response. Say it anyway, and then carry on with whatever the conversation was.

You have permission to say a formal sentence in an ordinary kitchen, and a thing said out loud has never once been able to stay uncounted afterward. Deuteronomy 11:19 puts the whole instruction into ordinary speech in ordinary hours, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a household names its own practice.

And if the homework never happens in your house, that is a separate matter with its own answer, and it is not what this article is about, and it does not make this ten minutes less than it is.

Deuteronomy 11:19 puts the teaching into the sitting and the walking and the lying down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a table where somebody names an ordinary thing out loud.

You are permitted to name what you already do, and naming has never once been the same as inflating anything. The written word locates the whole of it in unremarkable hours, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a sentence gets said that has never been said.

You have been doing this for months without a word for it, and it has never once needed a word in order to have been real. Deuteronomy 11:19 lists the ordinary times and nothing else, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a household a name for its own practice.