Patience

I’ve been working with the boy on his multiplication and division techniques the past few days. I’ve generally been less than impressed with the pace of the math program here. I’ve also been flabbergasted as to some of the techniques they are teaching kids which, in my view, add unnecessary extra steps that make arriving at the correct answer error prone.

Tonight I was working with him on division. My approach was to show him how to do it while explaining each step. Then, started involving him more and more on subsequent problems. Finally, I started giving him the problems to work on his own.

He struggled with it. He’d forget a step, or get confused by a step, or make a calculation error. Then he’d start to get frustrated with himself.

And that’s where I realized that I was the one who had to exercise patience. Here, the math is easy for me, while he’s the one trying to learn it. Just because I can do division easily doesn’t mean he’ll figure it out in a few minutes. It takes time for him to master the steps involved and it isn’t going to happen in a single night with 30 minutes of instruction.

Another mistake I find myself making trying to think back to what I might have been doing at his particular age. But it’s irrelevant what I was doing because he’s not me. It seems such an obvious point, but I’ve found it’s an easy one for me to miss.

So for all the times I’ve told the kids to be patient, it turns out that I must practice what I preach. Just because I’m grown up doesn’t mean I can’t benefit from the same lessons the kids do.