No MATH Wizard but I can answer that - funny Dad

I am no math wizard but I love to hear that my son tells his teacher “Oh, I know that – my father already taught me that”.

It’s a wonderful feeling. But as I said, I am not a math wizard and I certainly do harness the power of the internet. I used YouTube and other sources to teach my son math subjects like fractions, order of operations: I love order of operations it involves multiplication, division, exponents, addition and subtraction all in one equation. Personally I think it’s the best way to have a young child practice all of his basic math skills.

Of course that doesn’t mean I do not run into my fair share of mathematical problems but that is what the internet is for – it’s a life saver.

For instance, my daughter came to me the other night asking for help with a math problem – college algebra, I know a little about that so I said sure: this was way beyond my comprehension. So first I asked her to show me what her teacher had shown her in class and to give me a rundown of what she knew (as in formula), because now a days everything is about knowing the formula – remember the formula and you can usually find the answer.

The problem was she kept getting a ridiculous answer so I grabbed the laptop and started a search, can you believe the question we were looking for was the first search option on google. Someone had taken the exact question and broken down for us to understand – while this was great, his answer was still wrong. So after much debate I asked my daughter to show me exactly what see was doing, formula, using the fancy above my comprehension calculator and I solved the problem: she was doing everything right except she kept adding one to many zero’s to one of her numbers. When I check the answer on that was wrong online – he too had one to many zero’s, so in the end, fat fast fingers were the problem.

Yet this was not the end, the adventure continues: she now gives me an even harder question and says that she has no clue how to solve it. So again I ask to look over her study notes. I ask her to use the formulas that were taught to her by her teacher and when we can’t find an answer I decide to cheat.

I decide that we need to learn this – the answer is not important, learning how to solve the question is, so I tell her to find the answer to the question in the back of the book and we will reverse-engineer the problem (working backwards to find the solution). Now knowing the answer to the problem we check her formula, her equations and each step she took: Bingo! We find what she was doing wrong and we fix it. After that my brain was toast – but there is nothing like the feeling of accomplishing, achieving and conquering a challenge. Hopefully my children will see my efforts and seek to do even better in life.