Math Troubles

The boy forgot his homework today, so I helped him out by improvising some problems for him.  It was just math work, double digit multplication in fact, so coming up with practice problems was easy.  I’ve already done this sort of thing with him.

As a side note, I’m not sure what to think about how they are teaching him how to solve the problem.  It’s easier to show than describe.  Take 35×41.  They have him solve 4 multiplication problems: 5×1, 5×40, 30×1 and 30×40.  Then those results are added to get the answer to the original problem.

Now, it’s a perfectly valid way to go about it and I suppose the argument is that it’s easier to perform the multiplication on the broken down problem.  I think it makes the addition harder but no one asked me.  Typical.  Plus it takes longer and I don’t think it lends itself to being done in the head- too many numbers to remember.

Regardless, the boy wasn’t overly thrilled with my giving him problems to practice.  So I gave him a few extra just to be nice.  He finished them without anymore comments.  I checked them over and he’d made a bunch of mistakes.  Amusingly enough, it was the addition step that he’d flubbed for each wrong answer.  Does that count as an “I told you so” or was it too obvious?

So the boy came back and asked which ones he’d gotten wrong.  I wouldn’t tell him.  He wasn’t happy about that at all and several minutes later, he turned back to me and said “They’re all right.”

“So you found the wrong ones?” I asked.

“None of them are wrong.  I checked them,” was his reply.

I was speechless.

I knew he had several wrong answers, yet here he was trying to create his own reality in which that wasn’t the case.  Essentially, he was saying I made up his mistakes. 

I was at a loss.  Arguing with him would be futile, because he was going to get defensive and start yelling.  I didn’t want to tell him which ones were wrong because he’s the one that needs the practice.  So how to resolve this little standoff?

More than a little exasperrated, I handed him my phone with a calculator app running and told him to check his answers.  Several minutes later, he’d corrected all his mistakes.  When he was done, I asked him if he’d believe me the next time I told him he had some corrections to make.  He chose to ignore me.

I suspect it won’t be the last time.