Hardest Goes First?

Do you have any "things" that you like to do in a certain order, but you don't really know why. You can explain it to yourself, but someone else may do it entirely different and explain it equally well. I'm not talking about sock, sock, shoe, shoe vs sock, shoe, sock, shoe, because everybody agrees the former is the correct way. I'm just talking about little things, and the sock shoe thing is definitely a big thing. A deal-breaker big thing. Right?

When doing homework or reading books, Aidan chooses the hardest first. Even if he chooses his two favorite books to read, he reads the "hardest" one first. Before starting on his homework, he looks through it all and sorts it from hardest to easiest and insists on doing it that way. On the other hand, Aimee does the easiest homework first and saves the hard stuff for last. Both of them can explain their reasoning seemingly convincingly, but I'm guessing that whichever way YOU do it, is the way that will make the most sense to you.

Watching him do homework reminded me of Alex doing his at about the same age. My sweet 18 year old Alex used to be 7, did you know? A long time ago. (It doesn't seem like quite so long ago.) He had a 5 sentence paragraph to write each day to practice the spelling words. His teacher firmly believed that if children learned to write the words in context, rather than in a list, they would continue to spell them correctly for their whole life. It's a great concept, but 7 and 8 year old children don't like to write that much every day. Each day Alex counted how many words were left. And instead of subtracting the amount that he wrote, every few words he recounted. It's not that counting was easier than subtracting; he excelled in math. He just liked to count them. I think he thought it broke it up and made it take less time, but I promise you, it didn't. Some days, homework seemed to last all afternoon.

This week, my friend and I went to clean the church. When I got there, she was already starting in the bathroom because "it's the hardest, so I always do it first." I, however, do them last because I don't like them, so I do everything else before. Unfortunately for her, (fortunately for me?) I didn't get finished with the other tasks before she finished bathrooms, so she did them on her own. (Incidentally, I was wondering if you all have families assigned or volunteered to help clean the church or if there is someone else who does that. We used to have someone, now we just all chip in and do it.)