Too Far Back on the Shelf

I felt horrible last night.  My younger one asked for help with her algebra homework.  I suppose I could stop there and you’d get the point.  The questions had no accompanying text with them.  Word problems with two independent concepts that needed to be rendered as equations.   And it was easy enough to derive the answer.  The girl is 12 and the mother is 36.  But can you show how to derive it algebraically?  “THAT’S THE ASSIGNMENT!”   Right sure, you just call the daughter “d” and the mother “m” and multiply them by . . .”  “You can’t use that number yet because you haven’t proven it.”  “Oh.  I see.  Well.  Then you could just divide both sides by two to simplify the . . . “you can’t make that assumption.”  Well, let me look at this then. 

I was given up on.  Rightly so.  Time was pressing.  It was getting late.  My older one reluctantly showed the younger one how to do it.  There was no left over bonhomie in it all to welcome me to the tutorial.  I dutifully looked it all up on line, to wrestle down this indignity.  I’d found the site of a math pedagogue I’d heard a Ted Talk by recently.  But I couldn’t find anything that suited.  The next morning I got an email by them notifying me of all the great things they were working on.  I quickly followed the link to remove my name from the “I welcome emails” list. 

Later she mentioned that she was learning about Nelson Mandela in school. No formulas required, I dashed to over compensate, by digging up a book with an essay I knew well, called “I Am Prepared to Die.”   And before he begins his indictment of apartheid from his trail,  I read to her from the introductory essay which describes his noble bearing: a man who carried himself as an equal to any man.  And I tried to explain the difference of nobility that was presumptuous and nobility that was admirable and she drifted off to sleep. 

A proper Confucian gentleman was never a master of any one discipline, but rather a capable practitioner of all the cultured arts.   His calligraphy was refined, he delighted in poetry and knew how to wield a guzheng and of course, was the sagacious adjudicator.  Certainly a little algebra wouldn’t have tripped him up.  Once upon a time I’d have known just what to do.  But some things are stored too far back on the shelf to access on-demand.