its awesome fun

To continue in the same vien with the last post… yesterday I was left alone in the morning with Jispa. My job was simple – feed her breakfast, get her to do homework and the practice math.

First things first – breakfast. That meant looking in the fridge for interesting things to eat. We had the Khulchas and then we had the zataar powder that we bought from London. One of the lovely bits of the London trip was a visit to the Edgware road which has these amazing rows of Lebanese restaurants. The fun bit is that the cuisine is a delight for vegetarians as well. We were spoilt for choice there with the amazing veg offering. In our naivety we entered the restaurant and asked – is there veg on the menu, he almost choked while answering – of course. I had been told about the street, but our host in London had recommended it highly and that’s why we ended up going. That was where we bought zataar to bring it back home. Made in Lebanon to be shipped to London to be brought back to India. So much for food miles.

So breakfast yesterday was fixed. Jispa loves zataar as well. After Jasmine left, I took the khulcha and put the zataar on it. Then I put shredded cheese all over it. Then olives and then a cheese slice. The cheese slice is yellow and the shredded cheese is white. So it gives an interesting coloring to the whole thing. Then in the micro it goes for a minute. Remove it and crumble feta on it – voila you have three cheese zataar khulcha. We absolutely loved it.

Post breakfast we sat to do our homework. I can’t really help her in Hindi. She asked for the Hindi translation of Sports day which I promptly asked Google. It was boringly apparent as ‘khel divas’. Then we got to the math. Here Jispa had to do fractions. After a few sums, I realized that while Jispa knew the sums she wasn’t really very clear about the fractions. She couldn’t visualize the problems. What then happened was a one and half hour session on fractions. Different sets of issues, different problems, different ways of looking at things. I was explaining the basic concepts of fractions to her. Then we went on to LCM and why we need LCM to add or subtract fractions. This helped her quite a bit. She was simply learning how to do the method without really understanding how or why. This way she could solve a few fractions directly without even using the paper. I don’t know how it might have impacted her immediately in helping her solve her sums faster but surely she walked away with a better understanding and a lesser hate for math.

Math is fun, it’s logical and it’s amazing. It’s evolved so beautifully. The multiplication and division and the fractions. They have a life of their own. I love them and now I love the fact that I am reliving them. I too did not know so much about them. While explaining to Jispa I am forced to look at them with a beginner’s eye. Then I am forced to bring them down to simple equations and situations and then look at them fundamentally. I broke it up into pies and pies and how you can get different parts of the pies to add up. I never did see them that way before. It was lovely and Jispa too loved it. She did get scolded in the middle but in the end she still loved it. I guess I must take more such lectures with her. And now I felt that we should have a white board in our home as well. The current one was designed for Jispa to access while she was three.

So Jispa and I are having some fun with math. Then today morning while driving her to the bus stop I asked her again if she enjoyed the session. She loved it. Then suddenly a thought stuck me and I asked her….When you multiply two numbers by each other – let’s say 7X7 you get a bigger number… But when you multiply two fractions ½ X ½ you get a smaller number… why?

Oops… it stumped her and me together. If multiplication is merely repeated adding then ½ X ½ should be 1, then why is it ¼

It took me some time to clear this out in my mind as well. 7X7 is seven TIMES seven and if you do seven multiplied by half you do… seven times half.  So I explained to her that seven into 1 is seven. Then seven into any number less than 1 will be a lower number. And hence ½ into ½ is half of half, hence a smaller number. So any number multiplied by a fraction has to be a lower number.

It seems so easy now. But to suddenly think of it and then logically solve in your head was so much fun. Especially with you 11 year old daughter. I loved it. The only problem is that I can only do these on Sundays or Saturdays when her exams are not on the head. Else it’s up to mom to ensure regularly work happens.

Mom and dad are in many ways opposites reconciling into each other to make parenting as a whole work. Its good fun going up with my daughter.