Homework Helper

Last weekend I had to help the older boy with his math homework and I now remember how much I forgot from high school. He's a junior and the help he needed was in Physics and Calculus, two classes which I never got through myself.

In Physics he had to build a balsa wood structure designed to fit in a certain area and hold so much weight. This was pretty easy to help with since it was mostly research and creating a drawing. That's something I can do and I taught the boy how to do in on the computer. He had the nicest looking drawing in class and today we'll find out if it paid off when they crush it.

In Calculus, he had to explain the relationship and reason for solving three linear equations and after two hours of Internet searching trying to figure out what exactly this meant, we finally found a web page with some examples. I had our student figure out a few problems on the page so I could understand how it all worked and it finally clicked.

We came up with a presentation of how you could figure out the cost of menu items at a Taco Bell by the amount food ordered versus the price paid. He made up a story about it and presented it in class the next day. I don't know the grade yet but from what the boy said, it was the most clever presentation in the group.

It was both fun and frustrating doing homework again, I almost forgot what that was like. Even though I had no clue what we needed to do I helped figure it out and learned a little something for myself in the process, not that I'll ever use it again. But isn't that what happened to almost everything we learned in school anyway?