Flight Response
Newsletter 2025-12-10
My wife flew halfway across the country. She said it was for work. I think it was to run away from math. Sixth grade is much harder the second time around.
My eleven-year-old, Lucy, has been having a rough time with algebra. We realized the issue late in the game. Her teacher logged a bunch of assignments one evening. The grade email we got at 4 a.m. the next morning was the worst news I’ve woken up to in a while. Given everything else that’s going on in the world, that’s saying something. School today is a completely different experience than when I went through it. Lucy can redo each of her assignments once to get credit for any questions she missed. That’s because she submits her work on an iPad, whereas my tablet was made of stone. Doing my homework a second time would have meant an extra trip to the quarry. From an educational perspective, the modern approach makes sense. The goal is to have students learn from their mistakes, not to punish them for failing to learn the first time. My teachers would have loved it if kids meticulously went back over their homework to correct their errors. We were stopped only by my school’s limited rock budget. The downside of the new method is that homework is never really done. If Lucy makes errors the first time, it goes from being her homework to being a family project on the second attempt. I was not cut out to be a math teacher.
Thankfully (for me), Lola has taken point on that unenviable task. She’s a chemistry major who took Calculus 3 in college. I haven’t taken a math class since high school. If you wonder how many years ago that was, I can’t tell you. I’d need a pen and paper to do the arithmetic. I’d have to go back even further to find the last time I did anything with algebra, which is the unit Lucy is currently on. In the intervening chasm of time, I’ve never had to solve for x. There might have been a few real life scenarios where I had to figure out an unknown variable, but I never once did it by sitting down and writing out an equation. If I couldn’t do it in my head, it was impossible to answer. The matter would have to wait for a super computer to solve it in the brief window between when AI becomes useful and when it kills us all. Even if there were some accidental basic algebra in my life, I’ve certainly never had real world circumstances where I had to solve for x that involved fractions. Combining algebra with numerators and denominators is the world’s worst mashup. It’s the exact opposite of peanut butter and jelly. But wait: It gets worse. Lucy’s equations have negative signs, parentheses, and—on especially dark days—exponents. I haven’t attempted problems like that since I was Lucy’s age nearly three decades ago. It’s fair to say I’ve lost a step or two since then. I barely had those steps in the first place.
Lola recognizes my shortcomings in math—and in everything else. Our many years of marriage have given her an encyclopedic knowledge of my flaws. After that first traumatic grade email, Lola led the effort to redo those assignments. It was a lot. She worked on them with Lucy on the day we went to my parents’ house for an off-holiday Thanksgiving brunch. That afternoon, she stayed in the kitchen with Lucy while the rest of us played a card game in the living room. From across the house, we heard wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Those are standard math sounds. Lola sacrificed her time and sanity to teach Lucy algebra, and Lucy hated her for it. That’s parenting in a nutshell.
We settled into that dynamic for the next two weeks. Then Lola fled. One of her co-workers was supposed to go to California for a science conference. At the last minute, he decided he was too sick to fly. Tis the season for colds that have to be measured with a calendar. He offered to send Lola in his place. She immediately called me to make sure that was okay. I have no veto power over her life, but I appreciated the heads up. It’s good to know if I’ll be the only one within 1,800 miles who can handle pick up and drop off duties. Even if I could have stopped her, I wouldn’t have. She deserved to do something fun somewhere warm. Unfortunately, the “something” was science, so she failed the fun part. I assume most of what happens at a science conference is people shouting the names of their favorite flasks and beakers at each other. Don’t mess with Erlenmeyer.
Lola was scheduled to fly out Sunday afternoon. Throughout that weekend, we had kids coming and going in every direction. Our house has as much passthrough traffic as an international airport. Lola left when all of the girls were still out. Betsy was on her way back from the indoor water park in Ohio, and the other kids were ice skating with BSA Scouts. They let Waffle come, even though she’s still only a Cub Scout. That’s the advantage of raising kids in bulk. Sometimes people take them places as a package deal. For a few suspiciously quiet hours, I had the house to myself. I used that time to mentally prepare for what was to come. For the next three days, all junior high math would be my problem. If only I had been the first parent to think of fleeing the state.
As soon as Lucy got home from ice skating, I ruined her day by telling her we needed to work on math. It wasn’t like ripping off a Band-Aid. It was like slapping on an entire box of additional Band-Aids that would have to be ripped off in the coming hours. I can’t blame her for being upset. The appropriate reaction to math is rage. Her teacher had given her not one, but two math assignments, both due Monday. Lucy had been working on them but hadn’t quite finished the second sheet before Lola left. Lola had checked what answers were there and circled the ones that were wrong. Her last act before walking out the front door had been to give me a crash course in sixth grade math. From there, it was up to me. None of us felt good about that. It might have been better to leave it up to the older two kids. It might have been better to leave it up to the guinea pig.
Lucy and I sat down together at the dining room table. I told her neither of us was getting up until the homework was done. It was now a cage match between us and the numbers. I would have bet on the numbers. Lucy didn’t appreciate being trapped like that. It wasn’t her fault. She blamed her teacher. She blamed her classmates. She blamed math itself. I didn’t want to hear it. Every complaint might have been valid, but that wouldn’t help us. You can’t solve math problems with excuses. If you could, I’d be Sir Isaac Newton. No matter whose fault our predicament was, we weren’t leaving that table until we learned some algebra. With great reluctance, we got to work.
I do mean “we.” Lucy did the problem on the worksheet, and I did it on a separate sheet of paper (The iPad part would come later). Then we compared our answers. If they were different, I had Lucy explain why one of us was wrong. It sounds like a learning exercise, and it was, mainly for me. I had to figure out what was going on. My approach was a little different than Lola’s. She came at it like a teacher educating a pupil. I came at it like Lucy and I were two kids working together at the back of the class. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be a group project, but it was now. Otherwise, we were both going to fail.
