“But Ma, I already know the 7 and 8 times table”.
Today I realized that my daughter knew the 7 and 8 times tables. I feel robbed. Ever since my eldest had to learn these tables, I’d been bracing myself to teach them to Nanga.
My son hates math. He hates the repetition. He hates that there’s only one correct answer. Teaching him math is no fun. All this is compounded with the fact that I too hate math. I really do. I can do simple arithmetic, but beyond that…no way. I think this stems from the fact that my educational journey was a linguistic nightmare until I finished my Ordinary Levels. Math, in my head, is bilingual. Try teaching math, in English, to a kid who hates math. It goes something like this: “Ah yes…what are these called…fractions” *asks me a question about denominators and numerator* “Babba, which is the number at the bottom?…Ah right, that’s the denominator…then you put it together…Hathara, paha..and that’s your answer, right?”
“Ma, what’s that? Ah five. Ok.”
Sometimes I get it right.
Now my son knows this, and he’s a real trooper about it. Our nemeses (note our) are the 7 and 8 times tables. Let me confess, after 7×5 and 8×5 it’s all add 7 or add 8 to 35 and 40 — I don’t know them either. Right now, at 34, I don’t think I’m ever going to really get it memorized. This isn’t a problem to me, so don’t get me wrong. I’m not bemoaning my mathematical ineptitude. I just never really realized that I’d eventually have to teach the 7 times and 8 times tables to my kids. Anyway, when Shevin eventually did get to these tables he struggled. And I struggled. We still struggle. We’ve come up with some fantastic ways to circumvent it, and it’s become a really rewarding journey for both Shevin and I. He’s getting the hang of multiplication and division and I’m quite proud of him. Armed with this hindsight I have waited patiently for my daughter (who’s way better at math) to come to me for help with the 7 and 8 times tables.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I waited for her to fail. Neither did I wait for her to struggle. She, unlike my son, is always quick to ask for help and does not bombard me with existential questions like, “but don’t you think it can be another answer?”. However, they’ve both been on the Online School train for a year now and I’ve become the teacher of every single subject. So I figured, eventually I’d have to step in with my armory of skills to help her navigate her way through the 7, 8 and 9 times tables. She didn’t. Today I discovered she knew it all along. She told me she picked up how the 9 times table worked after I’d explained it to aiya, and the 7 and 8 had just come naturally after that. I felt robbed. It was like her first day at Montessori when I expected her to cry, instead she gleefully ran away from me into the arms of another woman.
The point of my story is simple; if my children, born of the same parents, living in the same house, insanely in love with each other, only 20 months apart in age can be so different as learners, why can we not accept that all children are different learners?
One can argue that no, my kids are of different ages and they’re exposed to different things — let me tell you, they’re not. I sometimes think of these two as my own little social experiment. I trial and error different methods using them as my own, personal Guinea Pigs. For example, one of my wildly successful experiments was with reading. Now they’re both avid readers and yes, they literally read the same books. They both listen to the same music in the car and watch the same movies and TV shows. Yes, once exposed they can decide which they like and dislike. But the exposure is equal. They’re just different. Different personalities. Different everything. You must think I’m mad to be stating the obvious, but what struck me is that we put a bunch of very different children into one class, inside one school. Then we dress them the same, make them all follow the same schedule, we expose them to a variety of stimulants in the form of teachers, prefects, sports, extra curricular activities…yet we gape and are aghast when a child, yes ONE child, behaves differently. WHY?
I’m not going to make my personal, reflective piece into a thesis on what is wrong with our education systems. But you get what I mean, right? It’s not the system, to be honest. It’s really the expectation of the system. These expectations are opinions, they’re judgements. They’re intangible. Yet we continue to cling to them, build pride in them, shame those who cannot and will not conform to these (unrealistic) standards,
If I am able to digest why my daughter’s journey of learning is different to my son’s, then why can’t this understanding be extended as a principle concerning all children, and all those on journeys of learning and discovery?!
It really just boils down to the three different ways I have now approached the damn 7 and 8 times tables.
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