She looked dead, and it threw him.

Everything else had been as he’d anticipated—more or less. The forest, undisturbed for a hundred years, had been thick with a green twilight almost as dark as night, but that, of course, was part of the legend. The thorn bushes were more daunting than he’d expected, with spines like daggers—a foot long, lethal and razor-edged. And their roses, so pale they were translucent, had an odd smell, more like rotting flesh than flowers. In the scant light of the forest they looked like patches of slime, snail trails against the leaves.

And although he’d thought the forest would be silent—sleeping—it wasn’t. It rustled around him, behind him, as he passed through, with flickers of movement he couldn’t quite see.

But the castle itself was entirely silent. The almost-airless silence of a place where no one had woken for several times his lifetime.

But although he didn’t dare sheathe his sword, and although his breath came thin and shallow all the way through the deserted rooms and the long silent corridors, nothing actually happened, and, unhindered, he climbed stair after stair up to the top floor, then around and around the winding staircase to the little, dim landing with the one door standing ajar.

This high up, above the forest and the enormous, magical thorn bushes, a bar of dust-choked sunlight had fallen through a narrow window to lie on the stone floor, pointing the way to the sleeping princess, the enchanted beauty he’d dreamed about for as long as he could remember.

And now he was standing here, looking at her, and she looked dead.

1. A bag of salad.
2. A large carton of fresh orange juice.
3. A magazine.
4. A book (Size 12 is not fat by Meg Cabot, as it happens).
5. Some bathroom scales.

Some of the worksheets were actually pre-exam revision sheets. So no information to help answer the questions, but rather instructions saying 'refer to your notes on the solar system'. Except Sparkler had no notes on the solar system, because they haven't yet studied the solar system.

Okay, that's not the end of the world, because she had done some work on the solar system at primary school, and I have a reasonable amount of general knowledge, and - of course - there's always Google. But when it came to 'products and reactants', and lists of unfamiliar chemicals, and hockey tactics, and map symbols - none of which she'd studied - I started to become annoyed. Of course we can look these things up. Of course I know some bits of information to give her. Of course we can put 'hockey tactics' into Google and copy down the various terms. But it's less homework (revising, supplementing or putting into practice knowledge you already have) and more, well, education. Which made me think, isn't this what the teachers are supposed to do?

Some of the worksheets contained wordsearches. When this was in French, and the words were French words (lapin, cochon d'inde, chien and oiseau), this seemed a reasonable way of revising vocabulary. But when it was in art, and contained terms she hadn't been taught yet, it didn't really appear to be the most useful way of learning them. Partly because wordsearches take quite a while to do (and, believe me, we already had plenty to do!), and encourage you to see the words as letter-patterns rather than words with meanings. So finding 'colour wheel' and 'complementary colours' and 'harmonious colours' in a wordsearch doesn't actually, I would venture to suggest, give you much in the way of artistic knowledge.

Worse was when the wordsearches followed two hours' worth of worksheets. If you've already worked through questions and 'true or false' tests and you've shaded three-dimensional representations, and you've drawn an ipod on a grid, it's kind of disheartening to turn the page and find a wordsearch as well.

Even worse were the PE wordsearches. We had one huge wordsearch (most of an A4 sheet of paper) in tiny writing, containing term after term for netball. Searching for wing attack and goal defence and obstruction, written upside down and diagonally, over most of a piece of A4 paper - well, not that I'm admitting to doing my daughter's homework or anything, but it can give you quite the headache.

Also, a wordsearch? For PE? I know some theoretical knowledge is a necessary, and useful, part of PE. But a wordsearch that forces you to sit, with your neck aching, over a piece of paper for longer than an hour (yes, really)? When otherwise you might be playing outside with your friends, getting, you know, exericse?

But the piece de resistance was the maths. Sparkler does not like maths, and although she's okay at it, it's not her strongest subject. More to the point, Abstract is bad at maths, and I am appalling at maths.

So I started doing the worksheets with her. And, to be honest, we struggled. Yes, I do have difficulty working out percentages. But we got through two or three pages, and reached 'numbers to the power of'.

I looked at them and bit my lip. Then I asked Sparkler if she knew how to do them. She said no. So I frowned, and thought, and dredged up maths knowledge from sixteen years ago, and worked out what she needed to do. And told her. So she started doing it, completed the first five questions, and I realised that I was completely wrong.

So Abstract took over. He told her the technique she needed to use. He explained it to her for about ten minutes, while the Tippex dried on her previous answers. So she started to do the questions. And Abstract realised that he was completely wrong.

At which point it came to me that I am not a maths teacher, and Abstract is not a maths teacher. Which is one of the many reasons why our daughter goes to school, where there are maths teachers - who won't waste twenty minutes teaching her the wrong technique. Twice. So we stopped with the maths, and I exercised one of the abilities I do have and wrote a note instead.

And then Abstract talked to a friend who has a son at the same school, and was told that in his case the teacher put the handed-in study packs straight in the bin.

So at least we did all that work for a good reason, huh?