Every week Sarah gets homework. Her teacher sends it home on Monday and it's due on Friday. It's not very challenging, it only takes about 15 minutes and it's right where she needs to be. I'm perfectly fine with that, I do not think elementary school kids need tons of homework. They need to go to school, like it, and enjoy being a kid after school since they've already been sitting in a classroom for seven hours.
Last week Sarah's teacher sent home some math homework that she hadn't had a chance to go over in class yet so Sarah didn't know how to do it. The teacher sent an email explaining that it was hard and that she would cover it on Wednesday. Of course we were doing Sarah's homework on Tuesday.
The topic was Regrouping with Subtraction. Apparently regrouping is the new name for borrowing. I guess they don't like the word "borrowing" because you don't technically give anything back, and they didn't think "stealing" was an appropriate word for little kids so they went with regrouping. Whatever.
Sarah had already learned regrouping with addition, so it wasn't too much of a stretch to teach her subtraction. So when faced with the problem 356-138, she had a harder time trying to figure out what 16-8 was then the fact that you had to change the 5 into a 4 and make the 6 a 16. I guess her teachers have been right all along, she's smarter than we think she is.
The next night we were sitting down at dinner and Sarah was telling us about her day.
Sarah: Mommy, we learned Regrouping with Subtraction today.
Me: And?
Sarah: You did it right.
She said this with a big smile on her face as if she was so proud of me. My kids really do think that I don't know anything. I can't wait until they have kids of their own and realize I'm not so dumb after all. Too bad it's going to be a long wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment