What a harrowing few nights I’ve had: sweating, shouting, throwing things at the wall, banging my head on the table. No, not a warm-up for watching England in the World Cup next Summer - I have been spending time this week trying to teach my son how to add fractions. I don’t know at what age I had to learn to work out the sum of 3/7 + 5/8, but I’m sure I wasn’t until I was older than 11.
It’s easy to add to fractions, right? You just multiply the numerator and denominator of the first number by the denominator of the second and multiply the numerator and denominator of the second by the denominator of the first and then add the resulting numerators and don’t change the resulting denominators, because the golden rule is that the denominators of all the numbers must be equal. And yes, I did use the words numerator and denominator instead of “top” and “bottom”, because that is what they learnt in class. OK, I was a bit more pedagogic than that, but you can see how complicated it can be put down in words.
It doesn’t help when your son says that he doesn’t need to learn maths because has been told by his (French) grandfather that he should become a plumber because they make loads of money without doing much work. When we pointed out to him that plumbers need to be able to add up in order to provide inflated bills to gullible customers, he still wasn’t impressed. He wants to be a rapper or a footballer – jobs that bring stardom and loadsamoney without the visible appearance of the exertion of too much energy.
Kids today, eh?
