Math. There's a lot of it going on at my house right now. Acquiring a Junior in high school for a year is proving to be a challenge. Not in a personality conflict way, in a "I don't remember any of this" kind of way.
For example:
Use the Vertical Line Test to determine if the following graph shows a function.
Uh... "vertical line test"? I don't remember a... <google> ...oh. If there's a place you can draw a vertical line through two points on a graph it's not a function. Okay... cool. Why does that matter?
And that's an easy one. The difficult ones are where I--who speaks English natively--can't figure out what the question is asking. I can't imagine how frustrating that is for the girl next to me who just flew in from Germany.
As a homeschool parent, you have an advantage over me. Your child probably did math last year and you (re)learned a lot going through that program. Now, you get to build off that knowledge. Me? I've lost it all. Domain? Range? I haven't had to think about such things for over a decade! And my brain, ever the efficiency monster, deleted those files years ago. Though, now I'm recalling we did something with that in MathTacular.
It's only been a week since school started for "my" student, and I've already said "I don't know" at least a half dozen times. But then I take some time and try to figure it out. It's painful; I'm surprised Count Rugen didn't use textbooks in his Machine. It may have taken him half a lifetime to invent a device that sucks life out of you, but these math textbooks seem to do it with ease.
All that to say, I was very encouraged by Heather Sanders' post To "not know" is okay. Great, even!
As parents, we don't have to know everything. But we do have opportunities--again and again--to learn alongside our children.
Keep up the good work.
And welcome to the "people who don't know everything" club. I'm glad you're here too.
~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Guardian
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