What does Nick want to do instead of writing his report?

Mrs. Granger, the Language Arts teacher of fifth grade, asks Nick to give a little oral report to the class the following day, based on the question he has asked her. Nick has a habit of asking teachers “delaying questions.” These are the kind of questions that are meant to eat into the teacher’s time so that relevant course work is not covered. “Delaying questions” are essentially time-wasters. So when he asks Mrs. Granger why she has numerous dictionaries in the class and where all the words in the dictionaries came from, Mrs. Granger cleverly evades the time-waster by instead reassigning the question to Nick as an extra research assignment.
Nick would rather play than write the report. However, his house has a rule made out for the children that homework must be done before anything else. So he is forced to work on his homework. Even as he researches on his report, he can hear the ruckus made by other children who are playing baseball at John’s yard down the street. Clearly, he really wants to go out and play with other children, but can’t.