The Lazy Scholar
By Glinda
My son is a first-grader.
Wow, it feels very weird to write that, and even weirder to have so many hours of the day without him here. Hours in which I should be folding laundry/cleaning/writing the Next Great American Novel, but yet find myself parked on some sort of soft seating device eating bon-bons.
Really though, I’m just waiting for the inevitable chaos that will hit when the newborn arrives and I don’t have time to take a shower or go to the bathroom. I know it’s coming, and I’m enjoying the short interlude of peace that I’m getting.
I was looking through some of the Munchkin’s classwork yesterday, and a math worksheet caught my eye. Mainly because the teacher had written in big red letters, “Re-do #’s 4, 5.”
And what, praytell, had my son done to warrant this?
The instructions on the sheet said to show the different ways in which colored cubes could be combined to make the sum of 7. Easy enough, right?
Except my child, always on the lookout for the easiest way to do something had this:
7 + 0 = 7
0 + 7 = 7
In his fevered six year old mind, those equations qualified as “different” because hey, they are in a different order! Thus totally qualifying as two different equations!
Help me.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
My certification is 7-12, but I’ll give it a whack.
You are basically attempting to teach the commutative property of addition. Of course, he won’t need to know this term for several years, but he will need to know that when you are adding, order doesn’t matter.
Try this visual aid: Place two items in a basket. While he’s watching, move the two items around, and ask if the basket is now different.
From there, you can move to two cards – one labeled 7, and one labeled 0 – and ask if that is different.
Alternately, you can leave the two items in the same place, and have him walk around to the other side. He now sees them in a different order. Does the basket change because he’s looking at it from the other side?
September 16th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I think he gets the concept, he was just being totally lazy! 🙂
September 16th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
As a mom of two boys, I think you have a somewhat typical little boy, Glinda. Getting a good grade isn’t necessarily much of a motivator.
They aren’t actually lazy, because they can work extremely hard if they are doing what they want to do, they just have a selective use of energy for work assigned to them by someone else.