You Never Know

So a couple of weeks ago, I noted that I was disappointed with the math the boy had learned this year. Mainly, I felt he hadn’t learned some fundamentals like borrowing and carrying for his addition and subtraction. I got a couple of suggestions that I should just show him myself, which is so obvious that I’d ruled it out.

More seriously, I’d refrained from doing it because the boy is typically pretty touchy about that stuff. I didn’t want him to get frustrated, shutdown and turn the thing into a nightmare.

But yesterday, an opportunity presented itself and I decided to roll the dice. Right after dinner, the boy was sitting around so I grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote a problem down for him that involved carrying. But I presented it that I’d reward him for his efforts. He wanted to know if as long as he tried that meant he’d get rewarded. I opted to put the screws to him and told him it was all or nothing.

Of course, he didn’t get it quite right. But he was close and I showed him what he did wrong. Then I gave him another one. Mind you, I was having him add 3 and 4-digit numbers to try and maximize the practice while minimizing the number of problems. Once he seemed to get it, I told him “Double-or-nothing on this one.” Even though, technically, he still had nothing. But his curiosity had been piqued and I kept going with it.

After a bit more, he asked about borrowing. So I showed him how that worked and gave him a few practice problems there as well. When we were done, I informed him that he could now add and subtract any numbers together. Which isn’t quite true, strictly speaking. But it was close enough for my purposes.

I even rewarded him with a little ice cream when it was all done.

So then when he came home today, he asked for a few more problems to practice with and told me he’d informed his teacher that he’d learned how to carry in addition. He even got her to give him a couple of problems.

So I guess it worked out OK.