Do you remember the year after you had your baby? Many of us (in Canada) spent the days, weeks, months following the birth of our first child; nursing, burping, feeding, drinking coffee, bathing, clothing, changing, swaddling, more coffee, rocking, reading, grooming the baby and catering to his/her every decaffeinated whim.
Ten years later, I find myself sitting at the kitchen table across from that same delightful, young girl asking, “What’s seven times seven?”
As I watched her wiggle her fingers over and over while staring at the table until she came up with, “Forty-eight?” I had an angry thought. Why doesn’t she know her multiplication tables?
I’m not sure who I was angry at. The teachers? Ah yes, the teachers. But why is it their fault she doesn’t know those tables?
Why am I not mad at myself? Or her?
When did I decide it was okay to hand my kid over to someone else and expect them to be wholly responsible for her understanding of multiplication and division? When did I become disconnected from her education?
Then Ellie, (our 8 year old) who had been asking ten times a day, “Have you ordered our yearbooks Mom?” finally got an affirmative “Yes Ellie. I bought three yearbooks. They were $18 each. Do you know how much I spent?”
She said, “Wow Mom. That’s fifty-four dollars.”
Huh?
It’s not as though her answer was instant but for the purposes of this post, let’s pretend it was.
I gave her another set of three, two-digit numbers and she came up with another correct answer.
“Ellie, how did you figure out that 18 x 3 was 54?”
She said, “Oh, I just added the three tens to get thirty and then one eight needed to borrow a two from another eight to get to another ten making forty and that left me with eight plus six which is fourteen so forty plus fourteen is fifty-four.”
WHAT?
Kids are learning differently and maybe my approach is not the same as the curriculum follows today.
Maybe I’m too quick to assign blame (if that’s what it is) for things I assumed were more important than others when I should be trying to gain a better understanding of the new approach to teaching the fundamentals.
Ellie also said, “Oh my gosh Mommy. You and Chloe look exactly alike when you smile like that. You’re just wrinklier.”
Awesome.
