To each his own:

All my children are different.  Well, obviously with a dad like me you would expect them to be different, but the surprising part is that they are all different from each other!  They are different in body type, eye color, pigmentation, attitudes, aptitudes, and interests.  In many ways I think we have more differences than we have in common.  We all live at the same address and attend the same church – but even our devotion to church varies from person to person.

We have children that we just expect a 4.0 average from, and others that we are pleased when they are just keeping up with grade level.  We have a child that has basically taught themselves to play the piano, and another who feels self conscious because they don’t play their instrument as well as the younger students taking from their teacher.  We have artists, game makers, game players, dreamers, spellers and non-spellers.  We have them all.

I have noticed that sometimes the child who does not excel at a particular task is the child who does not see the importance of mastering that task.  One of the kids has been struggling with times tables and has not responded to any kind of pushing to learn them.  The class is working on ‘eight times’ this week and so we began working on them.  I have not spent as much time with this child as I should have because I was being told that the tutor had everything in hand.  I regret leaving this to others now because they did not know even the ‘eight times’ that they should have learned in the ‘two, three, four, or five times’.  They just don’t know any of their times tables.

This child is a worker.  This child can be so dedicated to a task.  This child has excelled in many tasks and has seen effort pay off but they had no interest in working with times tables.  I had to start at the beginning with sacks of marbles to teach them what times tables really were:  Counting groups (sacks) of things to figure out how many total things there were.  I don’t think anyone had ever stopped to tell this child how times tables applied to the real world.

Once they could see a use for times tables, we interviewed the older children and asked them if they ever used times tables in their math. Together this child and I discovered that every single one of them had to use times tables every single day to do their math.  Together we learned that you can’t go on to learn any more math unless you first learn your times tables.  Together we discovered that the idea of learning the tables was not just to get a good grade on the weekly test and then forget about them but to master them so you can go on to learn other things.

When I got home from work last night, I found this child playing with an older brother and at first I was ready to be angry because I had told this child to find someone to help them with times tables.  Fortunately I waited to erupt until I figured out that the pushing around on the floor that they were doing was related to learning – the older child would ask a times table question and the younger one would answer.  If the answer was correct he was pulled back from the brink of the stairs going down, if the answer was wrong he was pushed toward the brink.  Yes, they were doing a lot of laughing, but there was also some learning going on.

I think I am going to fire the tutor (at least refuse to pay my half – I can’t very well tell my ex what to do with her money).  I think that I can accomplish more with the same time.  I think this child responds better to me than to my ex or the tutor.  I think I have a responsibility to this child that I cannot hire out to someone else.

Of course I need to make sure that I can make time available and to dedicate that time to the needs of this child.  Finding the time is the frightening task – but making sure that the time does not get stolen away will be no easier than finding it in the first place.

 

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   One Man

A father’s work…

I have really enjoyed helping four teenaged kids do their homework every night.  I think I may have mentioned that before but the enjoyment continues.  It is nice that I still understand the concepts they are learning, or at least can look at a problem and help them figure out how to resolve it.  It is the teacher in me coming out.  Last night was no exception.

Our oldest boy was struggling with some math problems because he had the answer from the back of the book but he could not make his answer match.  The problems were about distributing a negative through an equation, and I remember this being a hard concept to grasp and to master.  I wanted to teach him the concept – I felt it was important for him to understand the mechanisms involved.

I showed him how I would work the problem, and came up with the same answer as in the back of the book.  This young man was frustrated because I did not do the problem the way his teacher showed them on the board and he was convinced that my method was flawed.  We backed up and I tried to show him WHY looking at 28 –(x-17-9) as 28 + -1(x-17-9) is not only valid, but helpful, but he would not believe that I knew as much as his teacher.  Eventually his frustration, not that he could not understand what I was doing, but that my way actually worked, was too much for him and he told me he did not need any more help.  Obviously, cramming the facts down his throat would not help so I left him and got myself ready for bed.

Before turning out the light for the evening, I went back down stairs on the pretense that I needed a glass of water.  I found two kids still working away at the kitchen table and both eager for help.  One of them was my boy who had spent the time that I was gone reworking all of his problems ‘my way’ and finding that not only could he get the right answer, but that he could get the answer in half the time.  “So, I guess your way works after all” he said.  He wanted my help again as he worked some story problems.

The other child at the table was working on a dissection of The Alchemist.  She thought for sure I was an expert simply because I have a first American edition of this book, and because I told her to read it a couple of years ago.  The fact that I was aware of this book, had a collectible copy, had read it, and had recognized the value of this book when I recommended it to her was proof enough of my intellect that she pressed me for my thoughts.  Unfortunately, my memory about how I felt while reading the book is better than my memory of characters or events.

It was ping-pong for a while, with both kids lobbing questions at me and expecting me to return them, but I managed to score enough points with both that they felt they could finish up on their own.

I went to bed feeling like I was playing the part of a good dad.  It was a pleasant feeling and I slept well.  This leaves me asking the question:  Why does it take so much work to get a good night’s sleep?

 

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  One Man