Thursday, October 7, 2010

6th Plus 1 = Eighth?

After five weeks back in school, Dominic just figured out that he'd skipped a year and is in eighth grade math.

It's called "Transitional Math," so what's obvious is how Dominic and I thought he was in a special class that gave students a little help or something.

What's not so obvivious is how it took my boy over a month to realize his class was all eighth graders.

The whole time, though, I've been thinking this stuff seemed pretty tough for twelve year olds.

Every night for about two hours, we've been converting bar graphs to pie graphs, decimals to fractions.

We've found medians and modes, predicted probability.

When I was about 10, math stopped making sense to me. So this is a whole new thing.

Somehow, over 29 years, I've absorbed some kind of math mind.

For now.

But I already know that these days of helping my boy are numbered. Next year, it's Algebra!

3 comments:

DL Curran said...

My oldest just hit kindergarten so I'm still able to sound smart for a little while... I'm dreading when he hits math beyond the basics. Never been my strong point. Good on you with helping.

But why is 'transitional' math skipping him up a year? And without letting you know? Shouldn't you have been told? Or does that not happen?

Anyhow, good luck with it! :)

Anonymous said...

I had a tendency to enjoy math in school.

Enjoy algebra, I think.

Sharon K. Mayhew said...

My daughter is in the 9th grade and takes 10th grade honors geometry. I discovered a bright high school kid in the neighborhood we can call when we can't figure out something. It's come in handy a couple times....