Chapter Zero Sum Game

Somewhere out there, my high school math teachers, be they living or otherwise, are laughing.  

Today, they get revenge for all the times I daydreamed through class.

My son signed up for the S.A.T.  He's struggled to knuckle down and practice.  To help him commit, I've offered to suffer along side of him.  That's right. I'm taking practice S.A.T.s side by side.  It is not pretty.  

I've also told my son, we will be doing this for the indefinite future, until both of our scores go up.   We will take a practice test each night four nights of the week, and one day of the weekend, his father will bat clean up and probably destroy both of us in the process.  Like I said, it will be ugly.  Since the lad likes stats, we are posting our records but right now, after the first round, neither of us are boasting.  I skipped five and missed four out of twenty.   His score paralleled mine.   We both know, in layman's terms, we stunk up the place.  

Math and I remain to this day, sworn enemies.  We aren't even on speaking terms.  Yet here I am, rediscovering formulas I didn't remember the first time around they were presented.   Every time I open a test, I'm reminded of my own high school experience and asking for tutoring in math.  "We'll start at chapter 1."  I spent the bulk of the weekend arguing we should start at Chapter Five, since that was the one we were taking a test on, but I didn't win the argument.   I think my dad in viewing my scores today would say, "I rest my case."

I'll still argue the point.  

After that S.A.T. mess, I think perhaps, "We'll start at Chapter Zero."

The Ratio of Humble Pie is...

Oh who cares?  I'm eating the whole pie.

Which is good because while I know Pi =3.14159265359...I've never once understood why, not even when I learned it.  Back in the day, I just memorized and regurgitated, without ever understanding.  Perhaps because few math facts ever were digested, it continues to disagree with me.  At the very least, we lack tolerance for one another. However this discipline and I have worked out an uneasy truce, born of years of systemic consenting neglect, reinforcing our mutual disdain.

But today, I forced myself to reenter the math world, and discovered a whole new reason to hate it.

I'm studying for the Praxis, and that means passing the math.   That means studying.   It also means my teenagers get to mock me mercilessly for my errors.   I'd love to tell them to knock it off, but it's hard to do that when you need them to explain the problems.   It is the cost of doing business with adolescent tutors.

I took the English practice Praxis.  I scored a 99 of 100 and finished in 1/3 of the time.

I took the Math practice and got a 63.   If they don't let me use scratch paper, it will be far worse.

During the exam, I could hear my gray cells squeaking and creaking, as the neurons fired up and found that a whole section of my grey matter needs dusting.   I did remember the slope formula y=mx+b.  Alas, I found it a slippery slope formula as I couldn't remember what to do with it.   On a multiple choice quiz, you don't get any points for recalling partially what is needed, and eenie-meenie-miney-moe proved itself to be an unreliable method of determining the answer.  So much so, I'm fairly certain when I take the actual test, there will be a word problem as follows:

If Sherry guesses at the Praxis on the math section for 1/5 of the 40 problems and gets only 1/5 of those guesses correct, what total number did she miss by guessing?  (I'm not going to go easy on you and give you the answer not because I'm mean but because I actually don't know, don't want to know, and don't want to know even if you know, how to know it).  

So after listening to my children question how I could not know what I obviously did not, how I could forget so much, how I've managed to walk upright and drive given my limited command of arithmetic, I went back to the world of words and took another test.  But my brain felt tired.  I scored only a 92.

Looking at the score with disgust and fatigue, all I could say was, "Et tu Brutus?" and wonder if I failed badly enough, would they send me to 7th grade as a student?   My only comfort, one day, these teenagers will grow up, they'll become adults in the adult world, and hopefully, they'll have children.  Hopefully, one day they'll discover they've been lapped by their kids, and I'll be right there, handing them the recipe for humble pie or Pi.   You take 3.14159265359...

Bow Before My Brain...or Not.

Yesterday, the impossible happened.

My daughter asked for help on algebra.

That wasn't the impossible part.

I agreed.

That was ...out of character.

She showed me her equation.

I pounded it out in less than a minute.  "Is this the answer?" I asked. That was amazing.

She checked the work.  "Okay, what about this one? I've been trying and trying and trying.

"Is this the answer?"

When she read aloud the equation, I took the moment to do a victory lap, to wahoo and to pump my fist. I'd done math.  I'd done sophomore math.  Those dusty brain cells still knew how to bang out a quadratic equation.  Bask in my smarty smartiness, I am Mom, I know math...go ahead...hit me again.

She read me a word problem. 
Back to Earth and Reality.

Three Minutes of Joy

Since third grade started, the fast fifty have been the bane of my existence.  The kids get four minutes to do fifty problems. My daughter dreamed of seeing her work taped outside the classroom with the loopy big neat cursive of her teacher's praise, "Well done Faith" or some such.  She studied.  We did flash cards. We did videos to try and memorize the times tables.  We did practice tests. Most of the time, she had "U"s (unsatisfactory) or I for Incomplete.  The closest we got was a high "S" for satisfactory.  But to be on the wall in the four minute club, you had to miss five or fewer.
 
For a time, we thought the glasses would allow greater focus and improve performance, but we'd reached February and the times tables were now considered to be known facts.  So the test was now only three minutes.  The S's slipped back into U's and I's again as she perpetually left the sheet with 14 or more not completed plus about five actual errors. 

Because it is Spring Break, I have given her practice drills to prevent backsliding with the week off.  Yesterday, she did a four minute test and I peeked at 180 seconds.  She still had 8 left to complete and five she'd skipped and five I knew were wrong period. These practice tests were as trying for her as for me.  At the end of four minutes, she had five wrong and three she still had not tackled.  I'd feel like an ogre as I checked off the incorrect problems.

Today we began the big experiment.  I've still got my reservations about Ritalin.  I don't want her to think a pill will solve her problems, but a pill may have temporarily solved her problems.  At three minutes, she had five she had not answered but every answer she had put down, was correct. What's more, she knew she'd aced it.

"I feel smarter and stronger." she said.   Me too.

Cramming for the Next Time

Yesterday, I couldn't help my 4th grade son resolve a word problem.  Now granted, it was on fractions and it was a word problem, but I have to admit, I thought I'd still be something of an asset at least until actual middle school.  

My older children long since lapped me in academics.  They're doing cool down runs around the track and waving me bravely on as I try to just finish the assignments. They've been very supportive but they don't ask me for help anymore.

But I'm not going down without a fight.  I'm not ready to resign myself to 3rd grade and down just yet.  So last night after I had to surrender to my oldest son as the tutor for the fractions, I took out the Handy Book of Space Answers, Everything You Ever Needed To Know about History, and my statistics book from graduate school. All three are subjects I completely stink at, and avoided as much as possible when they were actually required.


Effective immediately, I will assign myself 20 minutes of one of the three every night before bed, sort of like intellectual calisthenics. I predict my occasional bouts of insomnia shall soon be a permanent thing of the distant past.

In the meantime, I hear my son's teacher for first grade is beefing up her curriculum so I'm boning up on fractions, phonics and Venn Diagrams. 

P.S. If you are curious, the question that stumped me is: A pet store has 1/3 dogs, 1/6 cats and 19 other pets.  How many animals are in the pet store?  Yeah. I know how to do it now. 

My return question: A mom has a brain.  1/3 is allotted to remembering children and their schedules.  1/6 handles autonomic functions.  19 other separate urgent fields of important stuff like what's for dinner, what I need to do today, the courage to practice driving with my son, how to potty train the 3 year old and when the bills are due.  How many slots of memory are left to fill with 4th grade math recall and will I still have space to remember where I put my purse if I relearn this stuff?

All I know, I Learned from the Internet

The older I get, the more I wish I’d paid more attention when I was in school.

That’s not because I wish my life had turned out differently, no. It’s just I would have preferred to not have my ignorance revealed on a daily basis when my children sit down to do their homework. Before I had kids, I figured I was all set. I’d passed through college and even graduate school with nary more than two “C's.” But there were subjects I avoided studiously, so as to avoid studying; like science and math.

Now a days, as a conscientious parent, I try to be a resource for all my children when they come home from school. But I’ve learned, you can’t bluff your way through the periodic table or quadratic equations.

When my science oriented children were engaged in a game of mental catch over the dinner table about the various properties and distinctions between solutions and compounds, I foolishly attempted to join in the fray.

But chemistry is a subject I ignored even while in the classroom with Coach Keister explaining that a mole was not an unwanted growth on one’s skin. Not to worry I thought, I’ve got wireless internet. I wikipedia’d the subject “Chemistry” while in the kitchen while getting the milk and cookies for snack. I returned to toss off a pithy reference inserting myself into the conversation while pouring.

My attempts garnered a “Where’d you learn that?” and “Mom, that site is completely bogus…” plus a snort of milk requiring me to return to the kitchen for towels followed. It got me wondering why Wikipedia’s so popular if it’s so inaccurate. Why aren’t real encyclopedia companies creating giant conglomerates of actual accurate information so parents across the fruited plains can understand what their children’s homework assignments are?

But those sorts of questions aren’t answered by “Ask Jeeves” or “Dogpile” or any of the other handy search engines out there that promise to open the flood gates of information to the world. I know, I checked while getting the paper towels.

“You have to go to trusted sites.” And of course they rattled off a few. I listed a few of my current favorite places to visit and got “tsked.” According to my children, these haunts of mine were the equivalent of “The Earth is flat” in their chosen fields. Now maybe others out there are more tech savvy than me and Lord knows I hope so, but the way my kids spoke about it, I felt as if the whole World Wide Web suddenly collapsed into a three volume compendium.

Listening to my children’s recommendations, it occurred to me that finding info on the World Wide Web was rather like dating. One had to make sure the page in question was honorable, accurate and not just playing with your mind. Playing the field was useful for discovering which ones would be worth going steady with, but blind dates were mostly scary and unworthy. If one wanted to be certain about the accuracy of information, one had to hold true to a properly vetted place with the fidelity owed a spouse, or in these days, a political party. My daughter offered to show me her fave spots that were best for tutoring in science. "That way, you can help my sister with sixth grade lab." she explained.

Having to do research on the classes I’d skipped twenty-seven years ago to comprehend a dinner conversation seemed like a bit much so I turned my attention to my other children who might have subjects of interest that didn’t require independent study. Alas, the high schooler started his German assignment which left me with my two years of Latin and three years of French useless unless he just needed the phrases from the song “Cabaret.”

The 4th grader started to tackle his social studies. Now I am social and I do study so here, I thought I could be of some use, but he didn’t want a 43 year old’s perspective on anything, not that that was any different from any other time of the day. Turning to the younger children, hoping to prove my mettle as a resource, I looked over their homework assignment sheets and asked, “Do you need any help?”

One child was working on a project concerning dinosaurs. I got excited. “We have books on that, and you can make a model with clay or paint something.” I began scanning the shelves for a few I knew had in depth articles on the Jurassic period with great color illustrations. “Mom, I’m just going to go on the website.” My son patiently explained. “But why assign it if everyone will look at the same page?” I asked. He shrugged. “The paper says to go to this page and read this article.”

I’d already pulled three tomes for his report. “Don’t you want any of this?” I asked? But he was already typing in www. And I wondered if we discovered aliens and wanted to share technology, would we need to change the internet to be the igww, the intergalactic wide web. Then I wondered if I should buy the domain name or see if the government would offer me money to devise it as part of the stimulus plan. I was flunking the motherhood “help with homework” section of the day. My attempts to provide aid and comfort were being ignored or rebuffed or bombing absolutely. I felt like the UN.

The second grader sat at the table writing her spelling words. She has a kinder heart than most and seeing me flailing at every front, she took pity. “You can help me.” She said softly. “What do you need sweetie?” I asked as I hugged her. She handed me a pencil. “You can sharpen this one for me in case the one I’m using breaks.”

My oldest finished his German. “It’s not that you aren’t helpful Mom.” He explained.

“It’s that we’d have to bring you up to speed and that would take more time than actually studying.” My teen-aged daughter chimed in.

I sharpened the pencils wondering if I had the mental will to go and secretly master everything about ionic compounds or learn the irregular conjugations of verbs in Deustche before the next evening. I decided I could live with my reputation as an ignorant adult. So, I’m educated enough to assist through third grade. After that, they’re on their own.

And when they’re grown, they’ll say “Mom, she was as sharp as the pencils she provided,” until we hit third grade.

23 Boxes of Powdered Sugar

I hate summer math workbooks.

I know the kids need to keep their skills sharp. Heaven knows I need a calculator to double check my sums when I write checks. But making your kid do math on a daily basis, when you add in trying to get them to read, make their bed, in some cases, indulge in a daily shower, not leave clothing on the floor and eat the occasional vegetable, it gets to be a bit much.

But now that I'm working with my 7 year old daughter and I'm dieting, I hate the math books even more.

Word problems currently try to be hip, interactive and engaging. Take three cans out of the cubbard. Take three boxes. Arrange them according to net weight. Which is heaviest? Which is lightest?

So we got out the powdered sugar, the instant jello vanilla pudding and a box of jiffy muffin mix, and a can of pineapple, tomato paste and refried beans.

The powdered sugar and the pineapple won the weight contest for heaviest.
The jello and the paste won the least.

Putting the items back away, I stared at the One Pound box of powdered sugar suddenly struck by its size and realized, I had 23 boxes left to lose, probably 25 if I used that one box on a cake frosting I'd been hoping to make. If I was truely serious about losing weight, I should use the tomato paste.

Damn I hate math.

Relative Math

God had proclaimed a snow day.

The County had declared a two hour delay.

The Jesuits apparently have a chronological system all unto themselves. A two hour delay means school starts at 9:20 a.m. So my son arrived via bus and Metro at school forty minutes late. He was assigned JUG. (Justice Under God, detention for all those non S.J. educated).

My argument that 2 hours+an 8 o’clock starting time equals ten could not defeat the emotionally indifferent “Did you read the parent’s handbook?”

I don't read instruction manuals either but usally, in English, 2 hour delays mean 2 hour delays.


My other kids got the day off in its entirety.
Why?
I lost my car keys.

Seven children fed, dressed, coated, mittened, scarfed and hatted even! Seven children loaded into the car with lunches packed for four. Seven children sitting waiting for Mom to drive them…and she can’t find her keys.

Even worse, Mom thinks she knows where the keys are…somewhere under the snow from shoveling the night before to clear the walk.

Now I could have just called and said, “Car trouble,” but with four children at the same school, odds were the truth would have come out anyway. I could just see my five year old brightly marching into her classroom to explain she got the day off because Mommy couldn’t find her car keys. So I ‘fessed up to the school. The secretary was still laughing when she hung up.

Exponents…

So the kids pile out of the car and explode into the home. By the time I unload my stuff and the baby, they have scattered to the four corners of the world, one on computer, two playing Nintendo, two are raiding the refrigerator for a second breakfast and one has buried herself back in the blankets with a book. Blowing my whistle (a’la Captain Von Trap), I summoned the horde.

Do any of you know what exponents are?

The two oldest raise their hands, eager to show off to the others what they know.

“Good.” I thrust a calculator in one child’s hands and a pencil and paper in the other’s.

“ You. Add this up. You. Check her math.”

You, all six of you come in the door. You drop your coats –those of you that can, (6), and gloves (12), scarves (6), hats (6), lunch boxes (4), backpacks (5), shoes (14), socks (13) how does that happen? and the baby comes in with her car seat, blanket, baby bag and then you add my purse and bag and coat and I have…seventy two things to put away. Add to that five beds to make…, the eight meals already served, the spoons, cups, plates and napkins, (32 items) and you’re lucky we even got in the car!

They are all looking at me blinking, waiting for the grande finale.

If you would like to eat before nine o’clock tonight…message received before she’s even finished pushing buttons to give me a grand total…they began scrambling.

Lessons learned…The Miracle of Compound Interest

I still haven’t found my keys. I've reshoveled the walk and walked the yard where I might have dropped them. I remember losing my student id and keys in the snow in Southbend Freshman year in early October. In April, I found them thawing by the sidewalk. At least it isn't as long a wait.

We’ll be able to drive tomorrow regardless, I’ll cannibalize my husband’s keys, but I have offered a ten dollar reward after offering a two dollar award and having no takers even for a cursory search. When I asked my son why he wasn’t interested in the new bounty being offered, he smiled, “Well, I have a lot of shopping to do for Birthday month.”

“And?”

“I figure if I wait a few more hours, you’ll raise the reward to $20.00.”
"Fink!" I'm thinking. "Fat chance." I say. "I could buy a whole new set of keys for that."

Birthday month is the season from March 8 to April 13th, when one cousin, two sons and two daughters have celebrations honoring the days they first started making their needs publically known. Usually Easter is sandwiched somewhere in there too, so it is a time overflowing with cake and celebration despite Lent.

We suffer our sack cloths and ashes in other ways…

Any parent who has ever accidentally won at Candy Land knows the game was designed by someone who either really hated kids or loved punishing grown-ups. Being a snow day and unable to go anywhere, I couldn’t weasel out of playing it by giving the adult excuse of “Have to run errands.”

So we played. It just doesn’t satisfy a three year old or a two to say “Good game.” So I go in planning to throw the game. On more than one occasion, I have deliberately miscounted to avoid the great slide of doom for my offspring, or self sacrificed and sent my own piece careening down so I could endure another 15 minutes of spinning the dial and moving the little happy people up the ladder.

It is a tedious experience, such that I have considered adding numbers to the number wheel like 20 and 15 to speed up the pace. Then it hit me. Those Jesuits used Candyland Math to get through the day.

So What Have I Learned?

Thinking of creating a Parent Manual with the option of an Evening two hour delay which would require that bed time be moved up 80 minutes in the event of a snow day or a mental emergency on the part of an adult.

I summoned the kids. "I'm setting the timer." I push 30 minutes. "The bounty for the keys is 10 dollars. If the keys are found in the next 30 minutes, you will get the ten bucks. After that, you get nothing but thanks."

Candyland toddler girl found the keys in five minutes. Wonder if I can swap the ten spot for another round of Candyland.

Moral: There is none, except don't lose your keys and try http://www.humor-blogs.com/!

Stand Up!

When I proposed the idea of doing stand up to my 14 year old son, he said,
"You should do it Mom."

I tried out some material. He laughed. Of course, I am his mother and I do give him a nice allowance. He's not exactly objective you understand.

So every morning I drive him to high school. In two years, he'll have a license and then my life will be radically better.

"Son #1, take child #6 to activity #47."

"I'll be a chauffeur?" He asked.
"As long as you have my car keys."
My son was silent as he wrestled with this revelation.

"How is it you turn every joy into an errand?" he finally asked.

"See, I've been 16. It won't matter that you're chugging kids all across town. You'll be so pumped. You'll say, "Hey Mom, do any of my siblings have an evening activity that you don't want to deal with? I'll be glad to drive."

"It won't matter that you drive to the same places I've been taking you for years. It won't matter that it is only ten miles from home. You'll pull into the parking lot of your elementary school and you'll drop off your brother for Cub Scouts and be thinking....(drop voice half an octave) THIS IS SO COOL.....I'm driving....with the windows down....and the radio on.....it's 23 degrees outside....It's still cool.....there's my elementary school Spanish teacher....yeah....I remember you....I had a "C" in your class....it kept me off the Principal's list....I've got a two ton vehicle at my disposal.....(Raises voice artificially high, waving) "Hello Mrs. Bailey...." (Drop voice again) I'll just rev the engine....just to make her nervous."

I am a mother of...counts on fingers...five, six..no eight, EIGHT? yes eight children.....I was never very good at math.

See...if I had been good at arithmetic, I'd understand exponents and multiplication and compound interest.

You're thinking...where is she going with this I know. Hang with me.

See, if I had paid better attention in math, I'd know that if it takes three hours to do the laundry for one child, one for wash, one for dry, one for fold and put away....that having a home with ten people, plus sheets and towels would take....counts on fingers...wait a minute...carry the 2....and...okay, 36 hours. That's Day ONE.

If I got math and it's tricky things with numbers, I'd know that fixing four meals a day for seven people, (Breakfast, lunch, dinner +snacks), that that comes out to 40 meals a day, Times Seven which results in 280 plates served in a week. If each meal takes an hour, that's 28 hours spent in meal prep. DAY TWO.

Now it gets tricky. See...I've spent 54 hours feeding people and doing laundry and I haven't brushed my teeth...and I don't know if anyone noticed, but there wasn't any sleep in those two days either....

I'm not sure if I should be operating heavy machinery at this point, but driving is a big part of my every day too. I estimate three hours are spent in the car and an additional three getting kids into and out of it. Six hours a day equals 42 a week...there are 168 hours in a week. I'm up to 106 and haven't showered.

It's getting bad.

But hey. I still have 42 hours left.

The reason I bring this up...is that I'm here. I haven't had to cook a meal..I haven't had to do some laundry...I have all this free time on my hands...so naturally I thought...Let's do some standup comedy.

It's either that or step into the back of the hotel and ask if I can do some dishes...I have all this time! I'm thinking of taking up learning cuneiform. Really, there's all these unscheduled minutes. What do I do? I've already brushed my teeth six times today...just because I can.

I'm here.

When I told people I was going to a writing conference in Dayton. They looked at me funny. "What are you going to do with the kids?" they asked.

I looked at them. "What?"

"I mean...we own a microwave.
...And a TV.
...They have a phone."

"Did you get a babysitter?"
"No."

"No?"
"No. I'm not paying their father ten bucks an hour to watch the kids. I'm just not doing it.....He did ask."

"I agreed to order pizza....

They'll be fine."

“When you have eight kids, you get asked a lot of odd questions. From really odd people. Don’t you know how this works? Are you going to have any more?

Questions that I naturally like answering to complete and total strangers on a regular basis.

The worst of it though was when I went shopping for a twelve passenger van.

“Are you part of a church or something?”
“No, it’s for my family.”

“So, you need a vehicle that big?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” His voice is getting squeaky and high.

“Really. “

“What? Do you and your husband just every few years get the urge?”
And I said….”Yes.”

“He’s really, really …really really….really really ….good.” Raise eyebrow.

Now my husband is my editor and vets my writing and stand-up bits whenever he gets the chance.

He said I should really have another really in there…just for comic effect you understand.

Love you Sweetie!

Higher Concepts of Math and Me

“Why do I have to learn these things?”the familiar lament uttered by my daughter resonated with my own grade school experience.

“No one has ever asked me to recite the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales either but I had to learn it."

My daughter gave me a look.

"Okay, I haven’t had to use the quadratic equation in my adult life…yet.” I admitted.

“Will I ever need this?”

“You never know, there might be some math mugger out there who will tell you give me all your money or explain the transitive property. If a=b and b=c then a=c.”

“Mommmm!”

“Okay, let me think and try this again.”

Higher math skills have never been my strong suit. In college, I got through the required core calculus class on a good calculator, prayer and several all nighters of cramming formulas into my liberal arts based brain.

When my oldest first needed assistance in seventh grade, I cagily suggested he teach the material to me, as that would indicate how much of the stuff he really knew.

After considering the possibility for all of ten seconds, he went upstairs to his room to study.

Using a similar approach with subsequent children, I had managed to avoid solving for “X” since my own eleventh grade. It’s not that I was a poor student. I always did the homework; I never skipped class. I even liked my teacher. I always thought knew the stuff. Then the test would come, and somehow, all the theorems in my brain became more secret and less accessible than Coca-cola’s formula.

I think the whole problem with math for me started back in eighth grade with an unsolvable math problem.

“If a train travels east at sixty miles an hour…and a man travels west by foot at six miles an hour and they pass in six seconds, how long is the train?”

I got it wrong.

The teacher explained the formula and drew out the solution on the black board. I wrote it down. Then I tried doing the problem again.

I got it wrong.

I restudied the formula and tried a third time on a clean sheet of paper.

Wrong.

I brought it home to my mom and dad.

Wrong.

Thus far I had plugged in the facts over six times and arrived at six separate incorrect answers. Having the problem, the solution, the formula and still being unable to find the one correct answer from the endless infinity of wrong ones, I mollified my adolescent ego. It was justified if I wasn’t able to beat the odds.

Since then, I’ve studiously avoided higher math skills the way Willie Nelson avoids taxes. I have not missed them. They have not missed me. It has been a good arrangement. In college, I was thrilled when I could abandon math all together in favor of being an English Major. Oddly enough, the first eighteen lines of Chaucer's prologue still stick with me in ways math theorems never could.

Last week, I pulled my time tested stunt on my daughter when she asked for help in studying for a test. However, as my algebra teacher taught me, I shouldn’t compare apples to oranges. She took me up on my offer. They were studying formulas like distance equals rate times time.

“Now Mommy. If a train is traveling at sixty miles going East and a man is traveling…”

I’m still getting it wrong. I may have to go find the math mugger and demand, "Explain the theorem of d=rt so I can get it right or I'll make you recite Canterbury Tales in Middle English. "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote..."