Mama Says

Our Audrey has a history of delivering some fairly profound observations about her world in a manner that is so casual and offhand that it often hauls her parents up short. Here’s an example:

Yesterday, the kids and I were making a whirlwind stop at the grocery store, between school and swimming lessons. Now, for our kids, there’s something about being in a store that is sort of like being stuck together in the backseat of the car for a long drive. Without access to other approved amusements, Ned and Audrey will pull out all of their creative stops. Hilarity ensues as they construct some game or other that, while annoying to nearby adults, keeps the two of them in stitches until they are released from the boring environment.

That’s pretty much what was going on: the two of them were giggling, intermittently obstructing the aisles as they fooled around, and generally getting very close to my last nerve. And then, all of the sudden, as I chose a loaf of bread and prepared to dash for the check-out, Audrey paused to catch her breath and said, “At school, I am a lump. But at home I am completely different.”

As was the case when she asked me, “Mom, what is abortion, exactly?” as I was merging into heavy traffic on I-90, I was unable to give her words the immediate attention they deserved. But I did stop to ask her what it meant to be a lump, a term I would never in my life have applied to my vibrant, funny girl.

“Well, I’m not special. I’m just a person in my class. That’s not how it is at home.”

First, it needs to be said that, from everything I’ve observed, Audrey is far from being “just a person in her class.” It may be true — I hope it’s true — that her teachers offer equal attention and affection to all the children. That’s the way it ought to be, anyway. But she’s hardly a wallflower. So what could it mean, to be a “lump”?

Ideally, I’d be able to sit her down and ask her to tell me more about what she meant. But the same emotional intelligence that causes her to make these comments in the first place also allows her to detect when her mother is making more of something than she thinks it deserves, at which point she clams up. So it’s left to my imagination to ponder it out.

The conclusion I’ve decided to live with is that she feels her specialness to be somewhat neutralized in the institutional confines of school. I suppose this is what cynical people mean when they say, with a certain measure of unbecoming triumph, “Welcome to the real world.”

I’m all for recognizing the real world, I guess, but I was also hoping that we’d somehow create a glowing sphere around our kids that would be fully portable and impenetrable, though transparent — a layer of insulation from hard knocks.

Ned asked, “Will you let Papa know about this experience?” So here’s hoping Papa gets pinged while he’s at work:

Just now, as the kids and I were chatting about their school day over fried pierogies and baked beans, Ned looked down at his plate and said, “Mama, I see the face of the Buddha.”

Sure enough, there on his plate, was a clear image of the Buddha in old age, with his eyes closed, placidly existing in a little puddle of ketchup.

“What do I do?” Ned asked.

I wasn’t sure. We decided to look up the Buddha’s last words, since the image looked old and peaceful to us.

“It says here, ‘Work hard to gain your own salvation,’” I told Ned.

We thought about that.

“But what do I do with this ketchup?” he wanted to know.

I told him to rinse it gently down the disposal, then get to work on that salvation part.

[Earlier today I was asked to submit a short piece for the newsletter at the Seeds of Literacy program where I tutor four mornings a week. I’m running it below as today’s blog entry.

If you have considered tutoring adults, need to earn your GED, or just want to improve your basic academic skills, I really encourage you to check out this program. It’s a comfortable environment where tutors and students are well-supported and have access to excellent resources.]

I remember when I really learned.

I remember the summer day when my mother taught me to iron shirts. She lowered the ironing board so that I could reach it, then stood beside me with one hand in the middle of my back and the other hand hovering over the shirt, ready to snatch back the hot iron before I pressed my own fingers.

I remember 10th-grade lunch hours spent with Mr. Hyde, my good and generous geometry teacher. I remember him eating his lunch from a paper bag while I learned what I could not learn in class. I remember him setting aside the book that confused me, and just working the problem on the chalkboard, explaining every step.

I remember the empty parking lot where I learned to drive a stick shift. I remember my husband’s calm voice as I ground the gears, assuring me that the transmission could almost certainly withstand this punishment.

I also remember all the times I really didn’t learn.

I remember splitting up the chemistry homework among several other lazy classmates and then sharing the answers, so that none of us needed to do the whole assignment. Not surprisingly, none of us went on to careers as chemists or pharmacists. Thank goodness.

I remember lectures in high school, college and graduate school when I would pinch my own earlobes or pull my own hair just to stay awake. I remember the drone of the professor’s voice, but none of the words.

I also remember reading over and over the same two paragraphs of my history assignment, until the back-and-forth motion of my eyes over the text put me into a state of self-hypnosis.

That’s why I tutor.

My moments of real learning have important elements in common: they all involved just one student and one teacher, an emphasis on demonstration rather than on text, and an understanding that I would not suffer if I made a mistake. That pretty much sums up the approach taken at Seeds of Literacy.

I believe if there was a well-matched tutor for every kid now enrolled in school, there would be a drop-out rate approaching zero. For this reason, I am especially happy when a student tells me about doing her Seeds homework alongside her children. I know that I am not only helping that student work toward her GED, I am teaching her to teach. While she is still a student, she is also a tutor to her own children.

Her children will remember those evenings at the kitchen table, when their mom taught a lesson for them alone, as clearly as I can remember my mother’s old cotton housedress, the clean smell of a freshly-pressed shirt, and the warmth of her hand in the middle of my back.

The other day I was talking with some of my fellow tutors at the Seeds of Literacy GED prep program. I learn a lot this way. Several of Seeds’ tutors are retired teachers, business people, scientists, or experienced parents, so there’s a wealth of knowledge handy and ready to be tapped, completely free of charge.

Some of what I hear in tutor talk is eye-opening, as when another tutor demonstrated “partial quotient division,” a method of doing long division that is especially useful when you have divisors that are more than a single digit. I rarely use any other method for long-division any more.

But of course, some tutor talk is, if not complete hooey, at least debatable.

Such was the nature of the aforementioned discussion. A former math teacher — a swell, soft-spoken guy — was commenting with much regret on the inability of modern children to do math in their heads. I begged to differ.

This is a topic that pops up at our house regularly. My husband, John, is a mental mathematician. And although I’m sure he doesn’t mean to, he occasionally reacts just a little scornfully when he observes me demonstrating to our kids how to write out, in detail, a math process. “Just do it in your head!” he cries. “Break it down! Do the hundreds place first, then the tens, put it all together in your brain!

Show off.

Now, I’m not debating that mental math is impressive. For people who can’t do it, mental math seems magical. I’ve gotten books out of the library, to see if I could teach myself to do what John can do without apparent effort. And I’ll even concede that if each and every American could find square roots without relying on fingers and toes, ours would be a stronger, more productive nation.

But I do contest the suggestion that mental math is more important than math done “by hand.” Moreover, based on the people I’ve met who are working toward a GED, I am increasingly of the opinion that an emphasis on “doing it in your head” can interfere with the much more valuable process of helping students get cozy with math.

That coziness — a comfort with math that is similar to the pleasure we get from doing a word search, a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku — strikes me as much more important than skill at mental computation, or even speed. In observing both adults and children doing math, I’ve seen that the students most likely to quit in frustration were the ones who were trying to skip steps, rush through the problem, hide their hand-counting, or jump to conclusions.

Meanwhile, another student who copies out the whole equation, neatly stacks her numbers one above the other, uses counters or other visuals — that student may spend twice as much time on the lesson. Of course, she may also attempt half as many problems, but more of them are correct at the end. Through the writing, even the counting on her hands, she gets to watch the problem unfold in some physical way before her eyes, revealing what Nobel laureate Richard Feynman meant when he spoke of the beauty of the language of nature.

There is, I concede, one aspect of mental math whose value is pretty clear. Mastery of the basic, single-digit arithmetic facts is essential if the rest of math’s beauties are to be experienced. I have encouraged our kids to get the single-digit facts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division cemented into their heads as quickly as possible. While some mnemonics and hand-counting rituals are themselves impressive and interesting (such as the “nines trick” Edward James Olmos demonstrated in “Stand and Deliver), spending too much time on basic computation puts the student off track, and slows his approach to the really fun stuff.

Who knows how many would-be mathematicians where nipped in the bud when they were shamed by their reliance on hands and pencil? I am no math whiz, myself, though I have come to love algebra and especially geometry. I dropped out of high school math classes in trigonometry and calculus in order to protect my GPA. Part of my math fear had to do with my embarrassment that a few of my classmates seemed to be able to skip large chunks of the problems, apparently pulling correct conclusions from thin air. Even if I could eventually produce the same answer, I understood that there was something inferior about my method.

It’s that assumption of superiority that I think has no place in math instruction at either the elementary or high school level. In fact, it should probably be the other way around. “Just knowing” is very nice, but being able to prove your knowledge — in writing — is more important, and much more scientific.

Last Friday, a full four and a half months after my doctor wrote the order for me to get some routine blood tests, I finally schlepped the two blocks to Lutheran Hospital to get it done.

It wasn’t that I am cowardly about getting my blood drawn. After two pregnancies and the wide array of tests I endured when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1993, a little cholesterol check is a cake walk.

And I also have plenty to motivate me to keep track of how things are going with my bloodstream. In 1987, my father died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 56. He had a number of risk factors, many of which I don’t share. But the closer I get to 56 myself, the younger that age seems to me — and the more pressing the need to do what I can to make sure I’m not headed in the same direction.

So last Friday, I finally listened to my own internal nagging and spent the measly 40 minutes it required to walk to the hospital, register, visit the friendly phlebotomist, and walk home.

The nag-that-trumped-all-nags — the one that finally got me off my hinder and on the way to Lutheran — was this realization: “Neglecting my health is negligent parenting.”

Which it is. John and I have read and studied a lot about negligent parenting over the past year of our adoption prep, so I don’t use the term lightly. Discarding all the flippant uses of this term — as when we say parents are negligent when they feed their kids cheese or hamburger — negligent parents fail to provide their children with the basic essentials of a healthy life: food, safe shelter, social contact, education.

In that sense, what essential could be more basic than the parent herself? What does it mean when I take my children in for regular well-child visits to the pediatrician, but don’t get around to scheduling a checkup for myself even once every two or three years? Sounds like I’m saying my kids’ health is more precious and worth monitoring than my own.

Many parents I know are modest people, so it’s difficult for them to look at themselves — their corporal persons — as their children’s most valuable resource. If you are one of those self-sacrificing mamas or papas who always puts everyone else’s needs before your own, I’d like to send a special Valentine message to you: Get Over It.

Okay, enough flogging that issue. Schedule your check-up, get your mammogram and, for heaven’s sake, check your heart disease risk factors.

And now, a little fun:

One way we try to minimize empty calories and fat in our family’s diet is to link certain foods to healthier actions. Example: potato chips are (usually) only eaten after we’ve done an afternoon of yard work. No ice cream in the summer except after a bike ride. Our idea is that until we’re ready to totally give up some of these favorite foods, we will at least make them harder to get. Maybe the extra thought and planning required to get them will help us remember to make them only a very small part of our diet.

So for Valentine’s Day this morning, I hid the candy, and gave both of my kids and my husband, John, a page of number questions to solve in order to crack a code to reveal the candy’s secret location. Finding the answers required lots of math, plus some research skills involving history. The kids were still working on their puzzles as they got on the bus, so we avoided sending them to school already carbo-loaded. Maybe they’ll even learn something on one of the year’s most distracting school days.

Here’s a sample of some of their questions, drawn from all three puzzles. Find the letter that corresponds to your numerical answer. When read in order, the letters spell a message. Crack the code and do what it says.

• Phone number for a penguin, the Fonz, or a guy who drives an ice cream truck?
• A scientist who did invent an early mechanical calculator (but did not invent the programming language that bears his name) died when he was this old.
• If you start practicing your violin at 7:26AM and end at 8:05AM, how many minutes did you practice?
• 960 + (304 “squared”) – (872 x 361) + “five million” – GIGSIS. (Hint: for “gigsis,” think about the eleventh question, below.)
• After today (Valentine’s Day), how many days are left in 2006?
• The sum of all the interior angles in a triangle always equals this number.
• 3841?2756
• How many babies in a set of quintuplets?
• In what year did Cleveland, Ohio celebrate its sesquicentennial?
• When you make an “about face,” how many degrees do you turn?
• This number means “Hi there!” to a calculator.
• How many Japanese warriors does it take to make a sushi-western?
• Square root of the number of possible outcomes of a roll of six dice.
• Two days from now, without the punctuation.
• The slope of a line with coordinates (-5, -6) and (-2, 15). (Don’t just try to plot this and guess like John did, because he was too proud to look up the formula. More on the questionable superiority of “mental math” tomorrow…)
• MCXLVII times V plus 20K equals ?
• The year before Caracalla’s fatal bathroom break.
• (Discovery year, sort of) + (3-digit palindrome number whose digits add up to an unlucky number)

Letters corresponding to the numerical answers:

A = 0.7734; B = 334; C = 8; D = 47; E = 180; F = 199; G = 4,262,665; H = 1946; I = 0.6644; J = 24,382; K = -6; L = 320; M = 13; N = 41; O = 39; P = 32,001; Q = 3,861,058; R = 7; S = 5,381,214; T = 216; U = 25,735; V = 1897; W = 1951; X = 254; Y = 90; Z = 0.873; (blank space between words) = 9; “ (i.e. quotation marks) = 5