Futility

My 11-yr-old doesn't get math. She has VCFS, and math non-comprehension goes with the territory. So I know that she won't do well with the subject. I know that she needs to be given time, lots of time. I know that we're still on 1st and 2nd grade math, and that's okay because it's entirely possible that 4th grade math is all we'll manage to complete by the time she's 18.

But sometimes it seems pointless even to try.

I thought we had a breakthrough last week. She finally seemed to understand what subtraction is, and how to do it. She breezed through a whole page of subtraction problems and got them right. The next day it didn't go so well. The next day it was worse. After one day without doing math, we had to start all over. But the next day, we had to start all over again. And today we had to redo the whole explanation of the lesson for every single problem. My frustration levels led me to take some breaks: "sorry, I gotta go stir the dinner" or "I really have to go jog now."

When I come in from jogging, my daughter meets me at the door and shoves her math worksheet in my face. "I got them done, Mom. Are they all right?" I quickly skim the answers. Most were problems over which we'd travailed prior to my escape in jogging shoes. But she had managed to accomplish a few more problems while I was jogging off some frustration. One problem, however seemed unusually clean and neat, with no scribbling for borrowing, no erasing wrong answers, no scratching out mistakes. My daughter points to that one and asks if it's alright. "Sure. The answer is correct."

But that didn't satisfy her. "Mom, I didn't figure that one out. I just remembered it and wrote down the answer. Is that okay???"

Remembered? She remembered 70-28=42??

"What do you mean, you 'remembered'?"

"I remembered it. I remembered the answer."

"But that problem wasn't on the page anywhere else."

"I know. But it was in that subtraction book you threw away last week because it was all finished. I had done that problem before."

"I gave you that problem before and you remembered the answer?"

"No, Mom. You didn't give me that problem before. It was in the workbook."

"Let me get this straight. Several weeks ago, you worked out the problem 70-28. And today you remembered that the answer is 42, and so you wanted to check whether it was okay to remember it instead of figuring out the answer again. Is that what you just said?"

"Yes. Is it okay to remember it?"

So I'm being stunned. This is a child who can't remember that 10-7 is 3 or that 8+6 is 14. But she remembered that 70-28=42. HOW do we get the basic math facts tossed into the memory vat alongside 70-28?

It's futile. It's useless. Why try? I think I should sit on the couch and watch funny movies and eat Snickers. (That would be my version of bonbons and soap operas.)

Actually, we didn't watch funny movies and eat Snickers. But I did dip into the therapeutic chocolate today. And I did have a jigger of Southern Comfort while I was setting the table for lunch. And we did open up the new word game I bought last week. And I did call off school with Maggie for the rest of the day, spending time with the boys instead.

As I fumed over 70-28=42 while finishing up the dinner prep, I thought that it's probably time to give up math. Better for her to learn to cook and clean and enjoy stories. (By the way, enjoying stories is something else the geneticist said my daughter wouldn't be able to do. Ha -- she was wrong on that one!) I was thinking about the futility of teaching arithmetic to a person who will never understand and may have to get through life without that ability. But then I thought about the futility of all of it -- teaching the other kids anything. Oh, I suppose they need to learn things for the sake of making them capable people who will be able to serve the neighbor. But today, it all seems ultimately futile. It's been about 17 years since I read Ecclesiastes -- maybe it's time to haul it out again.