Life With Lois

Okay, so this is a little bit of a rip-off of The Incredibles, but I didn’t have a second grader in math when I first saw the movie, and I didn’t realize that Math had actually “changed” so much since I had been taught it. Lois has gotten some problems wrong in her online lessons lately, so I figured I would spend some time to teach her. However, it turns out they are learning subtraction and addition in a totally different manner than I did. Apparently these number bond things teach kids why math works the way it does. The old way of “borrowing” and “carrying” apparently causes a lot of kids to get the problems right, but not understand why they do the things they do. I had to get the parent guidebook from the teacher to understand what was going on, in order to help her with basic addition and subtraction. I certainly hope they haven’t changed Calculus since I took it…

It’s really interesting watching kids learn the basic skills that parents take for granted. Stuff like addition and reading, are stuff that I’ve taken for granted for so long, that it can be incredibly frustrating to watch your kid struggle with what I assume should be a trivial task. It’s been so long since I learned those skills, that I’ve simply forgotten how hard I worked to learn those skills.