Yo-Yo, Steph, and the Homework Garden
“What do you do every day that’s the equivalent of a musician practicing their scales?” — Tyler Cowen
Yo-Yo and Steph
Many nights our students face a chaos Yo-Yo Ma and Steph Curry never do. One Tuesday, Alex is buried under two five-page research papers and pre-calc project due within forty-eight hours; the next week his only obligation is an optional reading and a five-minute Spanish worksheet. Same kid, same semester, wildly uneven rhythm. The stakes stay high, but the cadence disappears.
Contrast that with the pros. Yo‑Yo Ma still logs three to six hours of practice on ordinary days. Steph Curry reportedly makes 500 shots per day in practice. They shine in perhaps twenty truly high-stakes nights each year - playoff games for Steph, concert evenings for Yo-Yo - but they spend the other ~345 nights building stamina no one sees. Brilliance in public is purchased on quiet, ordinary evenings.
Steph and Yo-Yo can count on that rhythm; they always know what to work on and how to work on it. So how do we buy that same brilliance for students whose assignments swing from famine to feast?
Think of homework as a garden with three kinds of plants — ripe, maturing, and seedlings.
Ripe crops are due next class period. They're tonight's worksheet, tomorrow's quiz review. Harvest them immediately before they spoil.
Maturing crops are assigned but not yet urgent - research notes, reading chapters of your novel, group-project slides. Tend to them regularly so they'll be ready for harvest soon.
Seedlings carry no immediate grade: SAT vocab, extra chem problems, long-range AP Euro reading, personal passion projects. They matter precisely because no one is asking for them yet.
In busy seasons the garden overflows with ripe crops that must be picked. In quieter times only seedlings are growing. Wise students keep a running list of seedlings so that on slow nights they always know what to nurture … and momentum never stalls.
Takeaway for Parents
Celebrate showing up, not just crossed-off homework. When your teen tends the garden nightly, the eventual harvest is abundant. The nightly practice block is their set of scales, their 500 extra jumpers, the hidden work that turns lumpy schoolwork into linear growth.
