New math

Helping AJ get ready for school one morning earlier this week, I was looking through his back pack and paging through the half a tree's worth of paper that comes home in his folder each day. And there I found a stapled packet that confused me. His teacher has this nifty system to minimize parental confusion - any papers that come home in the left side of the folder should be left at home. The right side - should come right back. (Clever, right?) But in the midst of the sheets in the left folder flap was one clearly labeled as homework.

I looked at each page to see what still needed to be done, and saw that all the blanks had already been filled in. But beyond page two, there were a lot of corrections. For instance, page 3:

Page 5... more of the same:

Once AJ sat down to eat breakfast, I asked him if there was something more he needed to do with this homework.

"No," he answered, "we already did that."

"You kind of had trouble with it, didn't you?" I commented. It made no sense. This is the child who excels in math. The child who I - as someone who chose a journalism major because I don't like math - would wonder, if it weren't for all that blond hair, is he really mine.

At this point, Jeff picked up the papers and flipped through them. "I did this with him."

AJ looked over and helpfully noted, "we got them all wrong."

Jeff stared at the subtraction exercise, looking at what the correct answers were supposed to be. "I guess I don't understand what he was supposed to do."

I looked over the instructions. In fairness to Jeff, I don't get it either. And I suspect we weren't the only ones. The weekly note/newsletter from the teacher included this excerpt:

"We practiced another way to subtract. For example, if you have 13-8 and you separate the 13 into 10 and 3, you can't take 8 away from 3, so you take it away from 10. 10-8 is 2, and 3 more is 5. So 13-8=5."

Huh? The only thing made clear by that explanation is my decision to pursue a career in writing. I suppose there are kids out there who can process math problems better in this way. But to me it seems they're adding a whole lot of unnecessary steps. Whatever happened to stacking the numbers vertically and subtracting first the "ones" column and then the "tens" column?

I looked at Jeff who looked rather glum as he continued to stare at the sheet. I couldn't resist teasing, "You realize you just made the blog?"

"Yeah, whatever. Just don't take my picture."

So that's the good thing that come from this. The bad thing is the realization that next time, I bet it's going to be me trying to figure out how to help AJ with his math homework.