Long Division

I've been sitting with younger daughter for the past half hour while she works doggedly at her math homework. As a math teacher, I'm both pleased and horrified at the work she has to do.

The Good:

• Someone has taught her to use big 0.5 inch graph paper to line up the problem
• She has amazing notes from class on why you need to know division, and its relationship to multiplication
• She has five steps to follow

The Bad:

• She has twenty problems to do, along with all of her other homework
• She's just finding quotients, and the remainders can apparently go hang
• she doesn't really understand what she's doing

This is a child who is doing her level best to produce what her teachers want. She doesn't really understand what the process is about, or what is happening with the numbers, or what she's actually accomplishing, other than completing her homework and checking that task off the list.

How is this learning? Or, where is the benefit to my child? It isn't intellectual growth as I understand it, but I don't teach middle school. What am I missing?

That being said, I'm really pleased with her school today. Over the weekend she and her best/only friend had a playdate-gone-awry with lots of quarreling and misunderstanding. Younger daughter wrote a long e-mail to the adjustment counselor, who made time to write her back, meet with her today, call me, and to offer to sit down with both girls later in the week to help them find ways to disagree productively.

Where's the Instruction Manual?

Tonight R and I sat down with D#1 to discuss her plans for the fall. We are trying to get transportation issues resolved, figure out after school programs, and get a sense of our budget for the semester. So D#1's swimming naturally figures largely in this picture. Some of you know that she has battled performance anxiety for much of her swimming career, and although she has made a tremendous amount of progress she is still hypersensitive about that struggle. She hates being singled out in front of her teammates, even to be praised for this progress, and even the most well-intentioned praise sometimes causes her to fly into a frenzy (not, of course, at her coaches--but at me in the car on the way home). While R and I both want her to continue swimming (and her coaches think that she is only now getting to a point where we might actually see some results that reflect her talent), we are also absolutely united in our resolve to avoid some of the melodrama and stress associated with D#1's swimming career as we head into the new short course season.

So we offered her a three tiered choice: accept the promotion to the new practice group, remain at her current level (which would mean actually practicing less than in the past), or take a break from the sport altogether. We explained that we would no longer coax or cajole her through a bout of nerves or a hissy directed at a coach, and that her choice was for the season -- unless she cannot manage her schoolwork -- re-evaluating the decision she makes now won't be open to her until the end of the short course season. We talked with her about the good that has come from swimming, including a whole new set of friends, and outlined for her the explicit and implicit ways that our family's life revolves around this commitment. It was a remarkable conversation, with three-way listening and communicating, and no yelling. And there were some surprises in the process as well.

At the end, while D#1 expressed a desire to have the time to take her aunt up on her offer of flute lessons, her initial decision (upon which she will sleep) is to accept the promotion to the new practice group. I suspect that she was surprised to hear her father speak so supportively of her swimming, as I think she's misunderstood the division of labor around her practice schedule as reflecting his wish that she play soccer or softball instead, and I also think she was surprised to hear us lay out our abdication of the posts of chief naggers (pack your swim bag, are you ready to go?). I hope we can stick to it, after this lovely moment of clear communication! When R and I discussed, ahead of time, how we hoped to direct this conversation, one of our major issues was how to help D#1 understand that her impulse to procrastinate is a major stumbling block in achieving her goals. I am especially pleased at the ways the three of us found to discuss that tendency without using the word itself, which tends to make her freeze up.

(Can I also say that I was very impressed by Michael Phelps and his mom Debbie, in their post-eight-gold-medals conversation with Bob Costas? That's a forum in which it is very difficult not to fall prey to the fatuous style of America sports interviewing, and they did not.)

[The school is going to give me a new laptop for this academic year and I ca hardly wait --the "n" key on this one is so sticky it takes 2 or 3 strikes to get the letter to appear & I am actually rephrasing some things in order NOT to use the letter.]

{Tomorrow I hope to show you my fibery purchases from the Northeast Kingdom, all other commitments permitting.}