Abe's Homework

One thing that I find incredibly boring is when people talk about what stunning little geniuses their children are.  It doesn't matter who it is or if the kid is really bright, I just don't care.  Mostly because the story is usually of something I've seen kids do a thousand times.  It is not unique.  It is just kids.  It is interesting how much children understand.  I think we usually see our kids as special because we've been underestimating them or something.

Anyway - if you're like me and hate listening to people talk about how brilliant their average children are, you can probably stop reading.  The following is all about Abe and working on his homework last night.  I was amazed by what happened.

Abe had some math homework that he was supposed to do.  He's 8 years old and in 3rd grade.  I like to supervise when they work on their math.  I've done this with Jolene and Jack.  For the whole time I have worked with those two, I have become frustrated.  It seemed that it had been easier for me than it looked like it was for them.  It wasn't that they were any less capable.  They would just become impatient.  Jack would tend to panic if he didn't immediately see the answer.

Last night was the first time I sat down with Abe with math homework.  Right away, I could see he was approaching it differently.  He was having fun.  There were several multiple choice questions and when he found the right one, he'd go on and read the rest of them just to see how they were all wrong.  I used to do that.  I never thought anyone else did.

The questions were mostly about "Place values."  Problems Like:

Fair enough.  But then (as far as I'm concerned) out of nowhere, came this combination question:

Ok - so Abe didn't know what to do here.  I thought maybe they went over some method in class, but I wasn't about to go into the whole n!/r!(n-r)! formula to show him how to get the right answer.  It might have taken too long to explain.  He said he thought the answer was "2".

I said, "How about we draw a picture and think about it.  So I drew 3 cartons of frozen yogurt and started drawing some cones to fill them with the combinations of flavors.  He then saw that the answer was clearly "3".  He asked if he should put down "2" because that's what he had thought at first.  I asked if he understood why it was "3".  He said he did, so I said it was ok to put "3" down.

We did a few more and he was getting tired.  Making silly mistakes.  I said he should go take his shower and come back and finish.  He said he wanted to finish.  I said ok.  Then about 2 minutes later he said that maybe he needed a break after all.  I agreed.  I told him that you can get this work done faster by taking breaks from time to time.

So he went off to take his shower and I went and started reading my book.  He got out of the shower and I told him to get his pajamas on.  After a few minutes, I went up to see if he had started back up on his homework.  He had.  In fact he had answered 4 more questions.  I was reviewing what he had done.  He hadn't said anything to me.  He was just working away.  Then I saw this already answered correctly:

I was confused.  How did he get that?  Did he just guess?  This one is much harder than the frozen yogurt one.  Then I looked over to the scratch paper we had used on the other problem:

Nice job, Abe.  Maybe I should have told him about n!/r!(n-r)!