Not Smarter than a 6th Grader
My daughter struggles with math. She names it as one of favorite subjects, but has a love / hate relationship with it. She needs to pay extra attention to it and get extra help from both her teacher and me.
So tonight she needed help with something referred to as sixth grade algebra. I grabbed a nutritious dinner of 10 corn chips, sat down at the table with her, and proceeded to produce a stream of drool from the left side of my mouth that would rival any in the existence of humankind.
I stared for a good 10 minutes. I didn’t know how to do it. So I stared some more, thinking that the four minutes of LDS General Conference that I heard yesterday would somehow count and I would become enlightened with the answers. After studying the patterns of the examples, I was finally able to explain it to my daughter and help her figure out the seven or so problems she needed answers for.
Did I do “algebra” when I was in sixth grade? I think not. Did I read poems by Shakespeare (that came next)? I don’t remember. Of course I don’t remember. Obviously, I am old.
Numbers don’t change. But the language of how we use them does. And I have decided that grey hair isn’t a sign of how many years a person has been on the planet, but a measure of how many times math has been “reinvented” since a person learned how to do a particular type of problem.
Filed under: Family
