Locking Horns with My Child over Math
This is an edited (and somewhat "cleaned up") version of a series of 3 e-mails that I wrote in October, 2002 while awake for 40 hours straight, withdrawing from medication. It is devilishly funny and, I beg of you, please remember that I intended no harm: I was just out of my mind at the time. People began publicly demanding that I be blacklisted from the forum. Thus began my hobby of trying to get lynched in online forums every time I felt like hell -- a hobby I hope is now in the past.
Some poor, unsuspecting soul -- who had even less idea than I about the chemical meltdown looming on my horizon -- asked what to do about her child, who did not want to 'show his work' for math and they were constantly embattled.
I replied:
I think you are confused as to where you are and what the rules are around here since you are clearly delusional and think we can tell you The Answers, in spite of our obvious deficiencies, having never met your son. Furthermore, I came here hoping you could help me out.
Nonetheless, I am most certainly One of the Wise People who Knows Answers. That is the Good News. The Bad News is that they are answers that ONLY work for me and my kids. However, if you haven't deleted this yet and are foolishly reading on, perhaps the following drivel might be useful (or at least teach you that I Don't Actually Have Answers and you will become ever so wise and realize you have to figure this all out for yourself through Edison's famous method of Eliminating All Those Things That Don't Work so you can narrow this down to a few viable possibilities):
I, too, am headstrong. Genes, being pesky things, made my children very much similar to me and we have been known to occasionally have disagreements, especially since they have the great misfortune of also having a few pesky genes from their utterly unreasonable father who does not understand me at all and genetically passed some of this Not Understanding Me on to his kids. This was, at some distant time in the past (like yesterday or the day before) a major problem for us, especially when we foolishly attempted to Teach Math.
After much observation, I was able to finally explain to my child What His Problem was: He, being gifted, likes to do the fun thing and Parachute In To The Answer. This is all well, fine, and good when he actually lands on the aforementioned answer. However, as he also closes his eyes when jumping, he Never Knows How He Got Here. Which clearly does not matter if he landed in the right spot, he, being gifted, and clearly having more brains than his mother who keeps bothering him for more details, being slow and unable to figure out how to get there on her own.
But, when you get past the icky division, fractions, and other garbage like that and move on to Fun Math, like Algebra, it becomes Ever So Important to Have a Map so that when you Do Not land on the Target, you can at least figure out where you got lost and try again. So, really, it Is Necessary to do all this boring and tedious stuff that might actually make you break a sweat (which, he, being gifted, cannot do because Only Really Stupid People should have to work hard enough for a living to Break a Sweat and he is going to come up with a brilliant plan to avoid such things).
And, on a more serious note, when I am tired of locking horns with my child who is annoying me with his tears, which is cruel because he is making me feel like a Bad Mother, I throw my hands up and surrender (the only Really Wise thing to do, under the circumstances) and go to the pool. This has many advantages: It makes him tired, because he actually swims, being young and energetic, and this is all to the good because I am too old to energetically do all that swimming. Which means that when we get back home, for a change of pace, I have more energy than him and just might Get The Upper Hand.
Additionally, I have concluded that I am either a plant or a cold blooded lizard (I am still trying to decide which is less insulting to admit to in polite conversation) and I don't really wake up and have energy until I have spent sufficient time lazing about, soaking up some much needed solar energy. Which means that I have that rare luxury of not having to actually interact much with my kids and, for a change, I can actually THINK (a rare pleasure for a female who has made the mistake of giving birth and not giving the brat away before she Became Emotionally Attached and decided to Put Up With the aforementioned brat, in spite of his obvious resemblance to the man she lives with whose hobby is making her life miserable). At such times, my brain occasionally functions well enough to come up with a better method for dealing with this utterly unreasonable child, who is clearly The Problem, since it could not Be Me (I being a saint, and the fact that he still Draws Breathe is abundant Proof of this and I would like to know why I have not been canonized yet).
In response to some replies on the topic, indicating other people had similar issues (and I was, by now, Really Whigging Out and well into my 40 hours of insomnia), I wrote another letter, clearly on the verge of hysteria. It is actually hysterically funny if you take it in the humorous manner in which it is meant and try very hard to NOT read it as an attack, which I never intended for one second. Sigh.
Well, since this is actually a REAL PROBLEM, and not merely the confession of one lost soul that she Has No Communication Skills as evidenced by her inability to make herself understood by her ever so intelligent child -- although I cannot be of any use whatsoever to people who actually send children to school as I didn't think I needed such expertise because I was told this was a list about homeschooling -- if you are one of those fortunate souls who lazily Does All The Work Yourself and Homeschools in order to avoid expending excessive energy on trying to get your child an education, here is another one of my Ever So Wise solutions to dealing with my Utterly Unreasonable Brat who does not like math nearly as much as his mother does in spite of being related to her:
I figured out that the real problem is that his IQ is at least 50 points higher than mine. This means that asking him to actually learn such dreadful things as fractions, division, and Showing One's Work is so dreadfully boring and tedious that it will put him in therapy for many years to come if I persist in such unreasonable expectations.
My solution was to allow him to sweet talk me into doing virtually no math whatsoever for 4 months last year when I was busily lying in bed negotiating with a friendly fellow, whose name sounds something like The Grim Reaper, about whether or not he would kindly take me away with him so I could quit having to suffer all these fool doctors. My son, who would have missed me had I gone away with Mr. Reaper, is ever so much more pliable now and only gives me h*** every once in a while. But that is off topic and I only mention it for my own benefit as I desperately need therapy and can't afford it and you people seem like a cheaper substitute. (Translation of Blarney: If it is a major battle, perhaps part of the problem is the dynamic surrounding the issue and perhaps taking some time off from wrestling with each other might give mom, who is oh so clever and wise, time to think up new ways to interact with Junior other than Locking Horns and, for variety, Wrestling Him to the Ground.)
Anyway, before I got distracted by my health problems from wrestling my son to the ground, I came up with the following practical solutions, which I will implement the minute I have that much energy:
A) I told him when he was 12 or 13 that He Would Learn Algebra -- before he turned 18 and I gave him a 30 day Notice of Eviction as a birthday present and washed my hands of any further responsibility for what went into his head. This was clever and wise of me as it meant I had 4 or 5 years to do nothing and not be bothered with the problem and suddenly remember this ultimatum when he was 17 years old and do something about it. (Translation of Blarney: If you are homeschooling a gifted child who is many years ahead of his age group back in public school, you DO have more time than This Very Minute for coming up with Wise and Clever solutions. You can even afford to relax occasionally and take your time and worry a whole lot less about how impressively he manages to Jump Through Hoops, which are Very Important in public school but do not Have To Be in homeschooling unless you decide they are, and I am sure you are Wiser Than That since you are apparently still listening to me.)
B) Since I could not afford both therapy for him And for me, and I need it so much more than he does since I am older, I took time off from Really Dreadful subjects like fractions and division that require Showing One's Work and, for a time, did Really Fun Math that had the capacity to hold the attention of my ever so intelligent child. This includes things like Conceptual Calculus -- a big hit since his One True Love is physics and he can see where this stuff might actually be Of Use, unlike fractions and division, and, additionally it is the one and only math subject he has run across that causes his mother more pain than it causes him, so he will put up with it for an hour just to watch me squirm and come down with a headache -- and Conceptual Statistics, which has the further benefit of having books available that have a sense of humor (unlike most text books) and are, therefore, capable of being kid-friendly in spite of covering academic subjects sufficiently difficult to be Interesting to Short Braniacs that some people call 'Gifted and Talented Children'.
(Partial Translation of Blarney: Why don't you stop bothering me and join a virtual support group for homeschoolers of gifted kids where you can learn something really useful, like the fact that gifted kids have special needs, such as requiring interesting curriculum in place of the drivel you studied in school, and, furthermore, it is Okay if they learn it Out Of Order because they are smarter than school teachers and can actually see how this fits together if you haphazardly study it instead of checking off subjects on a list of The Order Math is Studied in Public School, which you can find at your library in the Book of The Right and Proper Way Things are Done. And, I know it is ever so much more effort than wrestling your child to the ground, put perhaps you could even find ways to accommodate his serious problem with Still Being A Child in spite of having a mental age that is higher than that of most college professors and may even rival mine. I know it is out of fashion, but children like to occasionally enjoy themselves and will give you less h*** if you let them once in a while, which is totally self-serving as it benefits you, so please do not confuse it with generosity.)
These books include titles like:
'The Cartoon Guide to Statistics', but please do not waste money on it as you really only need the first few chapters since they cover what was covered in my college Intro to Statistics class and I do not understand the rest of the book, having not had Really Advanced Statistics classes at college, and do not wish to admit that to my children. Therefore, go to some fool like me who already has the book and see if they will kindly sell you the few chapters you really need so it fits in your budget.
'How to Lie with Statistics', which, while it does not benefit by having cute pictures at least it is written in English and has no real formulas or problems in it that might require Showing One's Work.
C) Returning to the topic of Conceptual Calculus: I specifically chose this dreadful topic that I had dropped out of at age 18 and never wanted to see again so long as I lived, because I am oh so clever and wise and realized that, unlike me, my child has Absolutely No Stamina and could not possibly have gotten through the 4 years of mindless memorization of formulas and how to work them that I did in junior high and high school. No, he has a much Bigger Brain than mine and this means he is one of those poor souls that needs to see the Bigger Picture before he can be bothered with all these tiny and boring details that threaten to make him Break A Sweat.
(Translation: I am manipulating my son into believing that Math Just Might Be His Friend by teaching him something related to a subject he has an interest in and, if you are oh so clever and wise, you can use this manipulative tactic as well since I forgot to copyright it, not realizing there might be a market for it when I thought it up all on my own without consulting total strangers in this forum about such things -- and you cannot prove otherwise as I have changed my internet name and e-mail address and gone into hiding so I could return to visit my friends here without being recognized by most of them in hopes that some of them would actually resume speaking to me.
In addition to manipulating my son into seeing math as His Friend, not his enemy bent on making him cry, the advantage of introducing a sufficiently braniac subject that has a hope of being interesting is that he might discover that fractions, division, algebra, geometry, and trig have a use in that, if you bother to learn them, you can stop doing unchallenging Conceptual Calculus and do Really Fun Things like learn formulas for your oh so favorite Physics and even how to work them out occasionally. This was extremely generous of me since I was not so fortunate as to know such things and had to wait until I was in my 30's and taking Statistics to discover that algebra formulas had practical applications other than torturing 13 year old Good Students with 2 hours of math homework every night.)
Michele
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