I spent the good part of two hours this evening doing math homework with my son. Simple
math, tonight dealing with subtraction.
Now when I was in grade school we were forced to learn our addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division. Doing it over and over again until you learned it. Remember
the multiplication tables you had to learn?
Well it seems they don’t do things that way anymore. They get the children to learn
the math in multiple ways through association and diagrams, pictures and other stuff
I still don’t completely understand.
Now I realize that I am getting dumber as time goes on, because I don’t use a
lot of the knowledge I have acquired over the years and it gets lost in the closets
of my brain and I forget where I put it. But, I feel I need to go back to school to
learn the stuff they are teaching these kids so that I am better prepared to teach
him.
I can still do my arithmetic, I can still add, subtract, multiple and divide, but
I am having trouble figuring out how they are teaching it today. The reason I bring
this up is because I don’t want to confuse this sponge of a mind, with my ways of
doing math, with the way he is being taught.