A Great Lesson to Re-learn

By Stephanie

I am constantly learning lessons during this homeschooling journey we are on (probably more so then the boys!). Often I end up re-learning those lessons many times. But it is good to get a reminder every once in awhile. Really good.

A little while ago, the boys decided that it was time to go toy shopping. Between Jason’s birthday, Christmas, Kyle's birthday and over two months of untouched allowances, they each had a bit of money burning their pockets and I had been putting them off for awhile. My only request was that Jason needed to figure out how much money he had to spend.

Some background…a few years ago I started acting as bank for the boys, mainly because we tend to forget to give them their allowances. This way we have a written record of when we give them their allowance. When they get Christmas or Birthday money they can either keep it in their banks or “deposit” it with me. Then if they are out and want to spend their money, we deduct it from their “account” when we get home.

It had been a while since we had updated their balance, so we needed to add in Christmas money, Birthday money, 10 weeks of allowance (!) as well as deduct for money spent on snacks after swimming and few miscellaneous purchases.

I have to say that I was duly impressed. Jason did adding and subtracting (much of it involving carrying) in his head without missing a beat. No hemming, no “I can’t do this”, no “this is too hard”. He just did it. Because it was real and it would give him an answer to something that he really wanted to know. And that is the lesson that I need to remember.

Jason has a love/hate relationship with math. He is very instinctual and can completely get math concepts but he hates remembering math facts. My challenge has been to balance these two sides. As he gets better at remembering math facts, he gets more confidant at figuring things out on his own. But he does need a push now and then. So we do “do math” periodically but not tons of drill and I try to throw in enough “fun math” that he enjoys (he likes the Marilyn Burns books like The I Hate Mathematics Book which focus more on the fun math concepts).

Now that we have started multiplication, we have been having lots of conversations about not seeing why he needs to know math. Part of this I realize is that I tended to do most of the everyday math for him. The idea being that he would see how I used math and start wanting to do it on his own (please don’t laugh…it is working great this way for Kyle! Kyle is constantly telling me to stop so he can figure out things on his own.) But Jason has no problem with letting people do things for him…not because he is lazy, but because he is a perfectionist. If someone can do something easier/better/faster then he can he prefers to let that person do it.

So I now make a point of letting him do the everyday math we come across. It has become a running joke between us and I think that he is seeing that there is a point in knowing his math facts. In fact I think that I scored some points when we talked about how multiplication would have been a much faster way of calculating how much allowance he was due (he manually added up his allowance 10 times rather then multiplying by 10).

But it is times like these where he does math pretty much effortlessly that help ease my worries that math computation will never be easy for him. It will be. I know that. I just have to remember it. And if all else fails he can use a calculator….

Stephanie is constantly trying to find that elusive state of balance in her life while enjoying her two energetic yet vastly different boys. You can read about their ongoing exploits on her blog, Throwing Marshmallows.

Comments

[Jamie]

This reminded me of when I was putting together our grocery budget for the month last week and needed to do the initial shopping list. I figured out all the stuff we needed and how much of each, looked up what was on sale and began to tally the amounts up when I *remembered* that I needed some help. So I called my son (the math hater) and asked him to figure out how much five laundry detergents at $4.79 each would be (such a good price), how much each spaghetti sauce would be if they were on sale as 3 for $5.00 (because we only need 1), and etc. He pulled out paper and pencil and said, "Now this is the kind of math that I like." It was purposeful, interesting and, therefore, important to him. So when he asked if I wanted to check his math, to make sure it was right, I said, "Nope. I trust you." And I did - and it felt really, really good.