stay in school, kids

 
Last night I had to use my Phone-a-Friend Lifeline for the 4th grader's homework. This was the problem:

It's a little blurry (and I'm not wearing my glasses), so here it is in the lovely Georgia font: Keith wrote the expression 10d to represent the number of dimes in d dollars. Is Keith's expression correct? Explain.

No idea. And I don't even know Keith. With that many dimes he's probably a drug dealer.

And why are they doing algebra in 4th grade? I called the hubs (math genius) for the answer. He knows I have a block and the only math I can do is figuring out what the sale price of dress is if it's 30% off. Answer: a little more than 25%. 

I've written about my lack of math skills before, but I thought I would go into it a little bit. In third grade I pretty much stopped paying attention when multiplication was introduced. I blame reading A Wrinkle in Time. I was far more interested in that book that learning multiplication. I was lost in math. No amount of flashcards could help. It was like a foreign language. Plus, I now know that I I had ADD, but girls didn't cause problems in class, so whatever. I was constantly told to stop daydreaming and pay attention. This went on throughout my career as a student. Have I ever mentioned that I was on the honor roll once in my life? Once. I was not what you would call a "good student." I was bright, but math-challenged. And attention-challenged. I remember sitting in Chemistry in 11th grade and realizing there would be math involved and I think I had an out of body experience. I also caught my hair on fire over a bunsen burner that year, then I had bangs. It was not my year for a plethora of reasons. 

Anyway, the child is bringing home math that is beyond me. I honestly don't know how I graduated from high school with my math skills (it was because I had patient friends who helped me). College was another story. I didn't graduate. I took remedial algebra twice. TWICE. That's how remedial I was. Oh, and I had to have tutoring to pass. At the time I was tutoring football players in English and getting math tutoring myself. I was convinced that English Ed majors had no reason to take Algebra. We wouldn't be teaching math, so we only needed a "how to average grades" class. If you knew me in college, you probably heard me say this once or 42 times. Sadly, the Education department didn't agree with me. 

Remind me to tell y'all about when I took African American Literature sometime. 

I really wanted to tell the child to write "Keith is obviously a drug dealer and needs a better way to keep track of profits."