"do you have any homework?" "a bit" A little while later "are you still doing your homework? Do you need some help with it?" Then starts homework crisis of the day number one. The one that goes along the line of The Boy not really understanding the homework which has been set, not asking the teacher for an explanation he can understand, not writing it down because then there might be a chance I could help and not remembering the wording of it either. After establishing that there is no point wasting any more time on that piece we swiftly move on to the next piece of homework. I speculate it should be quick and easy since all it is is learning squares from 1 to 20. Piece of cake, after all he already knows his time tables to 12, 20 square is a doddle so it's a series of 7 pairs of numbers to learn by rote, not fun but it should take 10 minutes tops. Not so. Under guidance he reads the pairs out loud, and in his head, in increasing and decreasing order, writes them down a number of times, tries writing them without the card with regular "just go for a walk for 5 minutes", in between. No joy and loads of tears as the only 2 that appear to have sunk in are 15 and 19. Help comes in the shape of an IM conversation with Neil who provides mnemonics and tips and a quick method to work out squares of 2 digit numbers. The Boy then works out 13 to 18 using the method and agrees that he may not have time to do all of them in a test situation but that if he gets stuck on 1 of them it will be helpful he also agrees that knowing the last digit should be enough of a reminder. After nearly 2 hours he is ready to go to bed. In the morning he climbs in my bed to revise the dreaded squares for the test with a view of my quizzing him on the way to work. As we walk he doesn't feel too confident he will remember the numbers, I ask him if he is glad he has a trick to work out all of them up to 99 in the future. That way I said "if you needed to know 48 squared and you didn't have a calculator with you you could still work it out without too much effort". "Oh, I wouldn't need it for that Mummy, 48 square is easy, it's 2304" I had a bit of a "huh" moment as I checked my "tables de trigonométrie" and found he was indeed right. "How did you know?" The child then rolls his eyes at the obvious stupidity of his mother. "It's close to 50 so you only have to multiply by 100, divide by 2 then take away 96". Somebody please explain how working out 48X48 in your head is easy yet it is almost beyond him to learn 7 pairs of numbers in 2 hours? I don't get it.
Brains work in mysterious ways
10.2.08 17:41
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Hope / Website (10.2.08 23:19) Because kids like to make everything difficult for you! 
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