Helping With Homework

Helping with homework is every parent's worst nightmare. Let's face it, we've been out of school ourselves for ten, twenty, maybe even thirty or more years and the ciriculum just isn't the same. When I was in school we didn't use calculators, we used our fingers and toes. History was a breeze as it was still curent events.
I've tried to make myself smarter to keep up with my kids, everything from taking handfuls of ginkgo biloba to improve memory functions to reading all the answer cards for Trivia Pursuit.
One of my kids got to thinking that in cartoons when someone comes up with an idea a light bulb appears over their heads. She then fine-tuned my Shop Vac to operate with my vegetable bag shrink wrapper. The plan was to suck all the intelligence out of the atmosphere and replace the vacuum in a lightbulb which I was holding with random thoughts and untried plans and schemes.
Let me tell you, if a vacuum is strong enough it can suck anything into anywhere. Whatever you do, don't try this at home. And will someone please get me out of here?