My wife offered me a compromise: “I will run out to get the pizza if you look over the math homework.”
“DEAL!” I shouted. I can be a man of action. When I see an opportunity — a GOOD opportunity — I jump at it. And this seemed like one of those. I will wrestle a komodo dragon to get out of a pizza run. Math homework? That’s a no-brainer, even for a no-brainer like me.
The school binder was laid out on the dining room table. The page of “math” sat atop it. Shoot, I didn’t even need to go looking.
“A sucker born every minute,” I thought to myself, proud of my coup. Wondering if I had magical powers that brought good luck upon me. “I always said I was special!”
Until I took a look down at the page … DIVISION!
I had been hoodwinked.
The little sheet of paper could hardly contain the 13,000 division equations spilling off the edges. Endless rows and columns. Unending combinations. An infinite sea of numbers tucked into long division symbols. 35 divided by 7, 64 divided by 8, etc., etc. etc.
Hoodwinked!
There were times in my daughter’s life when looking over math homework — shoot, any homework — required about 15 seconds. I would pretend to review it three or four times so my wife would think I had been “present in the experience.” As a parent, you can’t just run your eyes down a child’s work and then give it a nonchalant thumbs up. No, you have to be “one with the homework” — a Zen-like state of parental perusal. Tap your chin. Ponder it. Study it. Give thoughtful responses: “You know, from a geo-political point of view, this is a very insightful take on why a giraffe has spots. Very high-level thinking!” It was never very hard.
But those days are clearly gone.
I pulled up a chair in front of the page of divisions, slapped a hand across my forehead and sighed: “I’m wrecked!”
This wasn’t “looking over homework.” To check this meant I had to actually DO the homework — run all these equations through my head and see if the answers matched up. Did 64 divided by 8 really equal 8? How the heck would I know?!? I was an English and communication major. And not even a good one. I’m still not sure what a pronoun is.
As I sat there, I realized something very troubling: My daughter’s fourth grade homework is on the verge of out-running my own limited math skills. And by limited, that pretty much means my ability to type “what the heck is 82 divided by 26?” into Google. What will I do when there’s algebra? Or calculus? Or trigonometry? (What IS trigonometry?!?) Statistically speaking, I’m doomed.
By the time the car pulled up and the pizza entered the house, I had just managed to limp through it all. Exhausted, tired and mentally-drained, I had learned the hardest lesson about fourth grade math: Always go get the pizza.