Helping with Boy’s math homework doesn’t add up

Jason Offutt

The Boy trudged through the door and thumped his backpack onto the kitchen table. I don’t know how kids can lug around something that heavy; it sounded like he’d dropped a bowling ball. When I was in sixth grade I was lucky to remember a pencil.

“I need help with my homework.”

This is one of the joys of being a parent – to rub it in your child’s face that you’re still smarter than they are.

“Great,” I said. “What is it? English? Sir Francis Bacon wrote most of Shakespeare’s plays, you know.”

“No.”

“History?”

“No.”

“Awesome. Science. Let’s climb onto the roof and toss eggs off the house.”

He shook his head.

I grew cold. Oh, no. It had to be math. Math and I have an agreement – it leaves me alone and I don’t threaten to knife it in an alley.

I know words. Words are pliable, as are the rules for putting them together. They’re funtastic.

See?

But math is rigid and unforgiving. If the answer is 42, the answer is 42. Forty-three is close, but wrong. I can get away with ending a sentence in a preposition, but if I try to pull that 43 garbage? Forget about it.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at numbers separated by a dot. Not a familiar multiplication sign, or plus sign. A dot. Like 2•3. What madness was this?

“That’s multiplication,” he said flatly. “Didn’t they have multiplication when you were in school?”

What?

The numbers were also a problem. I can deal with numbers as long as they have the decency to behave themselves. These numbers weren’t doing that; they were fractions.

“So, you’re supposed to multiply fractions?”

He nodded.

“Great,” I said, shutting the textbook. “The famous Italian mathematician Plato Tiburtinus was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for suggesting it was possible to multiply fractions. Just draw a frowny face on the paper and you’re good. Homework done.”

Apparently he wanted to prove the Church wrong.

We relied heavily on his textbook, the internet (parentalfailure.info) and a spell from Harry Potter, but we actually multiplied fractions. I’m glad he wasn’t asked to divide fractions; the textbook suggested this could only be done by multiplying the fraction then sacrificing a cat to the Sumerian god of Headaches.

Multiply to divide? That’s crazy talk.

There are things as parents we do that we thought we would never do again. Wear pants in the house is one, eat food off the floor is another. The third is math.

My biggest fear is for one of my children to bring home algebra homework. Algebra is the needy boyfriend of the math world. From what I remember, this type of math’s main goal is to find its ex. As elusive as this was for me when I took algebra, I could only assume algebra’s ex got a restraining order.

But that’s future math. Present math is finished. Now is the time to drop things off the roof.

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