The boy and I were killing time while the lass was at her dance class. He was reading and I was checking some thing on the web when I offered to work with him on his math. He’d asked me if we could practice it some more this morning. I think he’s getting bored with the current math curriculum at school.
I’d been helping him learn how to do long division as well as perform multi-digit multiplication. The nice thing about these two are the reinforcing nature of their operation. In order to multiply multi-digit numbers, he has to know his single digit multiplication cold, plus he get practice with addition. Same thing for division, which covers the other 2 operations.
The experience working with him was most unpleasant.
He griped about the problems. He was constantly looking for short-circuit answers rather than practicing the algorithms for performing the multiplication or division. He snapped at me. He kept making simple mistakes with his multiplication and addition. He kept forgetting the steps to take.
The Wife called while we were doing this stuff and she almost hung-up on him.
Mercifully, the time arrived for us to go get his sister. So I told him we’d try again after dinner.
When that time arrived, the difference was amazing. No grumpiness or moodiness. He remembered how to perform the operations. When he made a mistake, he took the correction constructively and without complaint. The simple math errors were gone and the only mistakes he made were process ones. And even those were associated with the curve ball problems I gave him, which I wouldn’t have bothered with earlier. In fact, I was actively trying to simplify things earlier, whereas now I felt I could increase the challenge a bit for him.
It still amazes me the difference a little food can make with them.
One reply on “The Difference Food Makes”
Definitely a chip off the old block.