Our oldest daughter is in the third grade now, and during the school year, my wife and I have been helping with her math homework.It's fun to work those muscles again after not doing third grade math in about 30 years.
Helping her isn't difficult, but it does take some time to adapt my teaching style to suit the way it will help her the most in her class. I have ways I'd solve the homework problems, but I need to tailor how I assist her so that it benefits her in third grade.
In case you're wondering, here are some of the types of things she's working on these days...
* Adding two digit numbers
* Rounding to the nearest hundred
* Three digit subtraction
* Multiplication
She does very well with her math work, and hopefully I'm helping with that a bit.
Also part of our conversation this morning -- after Jay joined the discussion -- was about some of our adventures with math in school.
I zipped through math without a problem, no pun intended. As a sixth grader, I, along with two kids from a different elementary school, would take a bus in the afternoon to the junior high to take a 7th grade class. Pretty heady stuff.
Also in sixth grade, I was a master at "Around The World". It was a flash card game. The teacher would grab the flash cards, usually multiplication, and have two kids that sat next to each other stand up. He'd show the flash car and whoever got the answer right would move on to the next kid.
And so on, and son on. If you made it "around the world" without losing, the teacher would take that person to Burger King for lunch.
Let's just say that my love of Whoppers may have been born in the sixth grade. Thank you, Mr. Rubini.
(I won another Burger King challenge in sixth grade by having the best time in the "Who can recite all of the helping verbs the fastest" contest. I still remember them all, too: is, be, been, am, are, was, were, has, have, had, do, does, did, may, can, might, could, must, shall, will, should, would. Good times.)
Then I got to calculus class in high school. I was as lost as Joaquin Phoenix. I had to drop the class. No regrets. I can't really claim to know the last time I had to use Newton's method for a given differentiable function.I can back-time to the top of each hour like no one else, though.
On my show Monday, newsman Jay related his story of advanced math skill as well, although with a much darker edge. As a junior high math whiz at a catholic school, Jay got to go to high school for a part of the day to take a higher level math class.
As if being an 8th grader going to a high school class wasn't enough of a tense ordeal for a 14-year old, Jay had on his school uniform, and was taking the math class at a public high school.
Probably didn't stand out too much, huh?
Jay and I didn't turn our math prowess into careers in science or physics, the most important math I have to do each day is determine if there's enough time remaining on the song that's playing to run down to the bathroom and back, but at least we're having a good time on the show each morning.
That about sums it up.
