1 Mother 2 Another

Second grade is the first year
Maddie’s had “real” homework every night, and in
the beginning it took some getting used to. Every night she has
twenty minutes of reading, twenty minutes of some kind of math, and
something “extra” – a website assignment, or a
worksheet, or a long-term project or something of that ilk. I think
it’s partly to get the parents and kids trained and ready
when everything gets kicked up a notch in third grade.


Reading every night has been easy: the teacher says “do
whatever” and I just let Maddie pick and am responsible for
simply logging in her hours. And hours. And hours. For math,
I’ve spent most of the year thinking it’s the same
thing – “Do whatever, lady! Just get your kid used to
thinking in a ‘math-y’ way for twenty minutes each
night!” So we’d gone all over the map with math.


You see, Maddie enjoys math, but doesn’t like the tedium of
memorization or practice – she likes the
figuring-out-new-concepts thing. So we’ve covered long
division and multiplication and percentages and fractions and
negative numbers and . . . you get the picture.

In what I thought was an unrelated topic,
Maddie has had a timed math quiz every week in school: some sort of
addition or subtraction with a note at the top like “stay in
the fives” or “move up to sixes” written at the
top. She’s always scored well on them so I never thought
anything of it.


Until a few weeks ago, when Maddie said in frustration, “A
couple of kids in our class are REALLY good at math! They’re
already on multiplication for the tests!”


“Wait –what?” I said, puzzled. “You
aren’t all taking the same test?”


Maddie stared at me. “No, of course not – you test on
the same family until you get a certain amount right in the time
allowed, then you move up to the next one, then so on. First
addition facts, then subtraction, then multiplication.”


Maddie is on subtraction right now.


“So you mean,” I said slowly as I figured this out,
“You take the same test every week until you’ve got it
right?”


She nodded.


And then I realized – I was supposed to spend this whole year
teaching my kid her math tables. She needs to memorize basic math
facts – to get down entire addition or subtraction tables
COLD.


Oops. Here I was treating math as fun, when we needed to be doing
the drudgery all along.


So the next time a test came home I paid careful attention to what
was written at the top – “move on to sixes!” and
spent the whole next week drilling Maddie. Much to her chagrin.


But you know what? She’s now moving up a level every single
week.


I feel like I owe her teacher a note of apology.


"Dear Maddie's Teacher: Please forgive her mother for taking 27
out of the 36 weeks to figure out how to do homework . . . "