Didn't help

Tonight the two young kids in the home where I am staying were doing their math homework. I was in my room and one of the kids, in 5^th grade, tapped on my door and asked if I would help them with their assigned problems (his mom knew I had taught math). I went into the kitchen and the family gathered while I tried to help with my limited Spanish.

At first the problems in the textbook were (intentionally) difficult algorithmically, but not unreasonable to do some mental math with. So I showed some strategies they could use to make sense of the problems, using patterns and the ideas that multiplication is repeated addition and division is the opposite of multiplication. That was hard enough for these two kids to get their heads around, although their two moms were having some aha moments.

But when we turned the page, the problems became completely absurd! Look at the problems on this page – big numbers divided by numbers with two and three digits (they didn't have to do them all). Who in this world of calculators ever does long division like this? What we need is estimation skills, not paper-and pencil computation skills. Let the calculator do the nasty work and make sure it’s a reasonable answer. But no. That’s not what schools do. They make excruciating problems that most kids can’t do and ensure that they feel like failures and hate math. And they force kids to do the work by having examinations with these kinds of problems on them.

What’s the point? This isn’t math for the real world we are living in. Adults, professionals, even professional mathematicians don’t waste their time doing this number crunching by hand. Why do we insist on this kind of torture for kids. It’s abusive.

I ranted to the moms – in Spanish – told the kids I was sorry they had to do this, then exited. I pulled out some of the bad words (malapalabras!) that one of the moms had taught me and mumbled some of them to myself: Carajo! A la berga! Pendejo! Didn’t help.