Am I smarter than my 4th grader??

I know that I should be grateful about this. After all, bribing government officials in India is no joke. It is an expensive business for anyone and more so for the middle class. Looking at the historic, exorbitant rates of bribery, I am positive that nothing less than utter desperation or blinding love could have pushed my middle class parents to do it and I am leaning towards desperation in this case.

I have no proof but my gut feeling says that my parents coughed up big money all those years ago to pay off the Education board of India to let me graduate from College.

Why do I suspect foul-play in my education? Many reasons really but when the first time I held my daughter's homework folder and my stomach involuntarily heaved in protest, I knew something was fishy. Forgive me for asking, but shouldn’t I be able to do a fourth grader’s homework with my eyes/ears/mouth closed given that I am a college graduate? Well, I can't, hence the allegation against my parents.

Here is a small sample of the problems that I commonly face on the homework front.

Math – Nothing gets my tear glands working faster than fractions, especially the word problems. The other evening, I was faced with my daughter’s wide, adoring eyes and the following problem.

A first grade class took a poll to find out their favorite ice cream. 1/4 chose chocolate, 1/4 chose vanilla and 1/2 chose strawberry. 2 kids are lactose intolerant and can't eat ice cream. If there are 22 kids in the class, how many kids liked each flavor?

If you ask me, can they not have a glass of lemonade each and be happy? Huh? Is Ice cream really necessary for the happiness of first graders? Somehow my daughter was not convinced with this argument of mine.

My evening’s homework woes will, by no means, end so quickly. Usually, right about this time a missile of a different sort like the following will attack me:

The entire third grade class is going to the zoo. There are 3 buses for the field trip. Each bus has the same number of kids. If there are 90 kids in the third grade, how many are on each bus?

Helllllllloooooo…..? What is wrong with the society today? If every parent took the responsibility of driving his or her own children to field trips, I wouldn’t have to sit and bite my cuticles off over the bus situation now, would I?

An important point to observe here is that I am very easily persuaded to double or triple the monthly allowance in lieu of escaping to the powder room in the evenings to avoid any contact whatsoever with Mathematics and yes, my daughter is very much aware of this weakness of mine.

Science – In the name of all that is sane in this world, why would I want to know Earth’s distance from the Sun? I am not planning to go there now, am I? Duh!

Grammar – Now, I know I have heard of irregular bowels but what is this ‘Irregular Verb’? And wait; aren’t pronouns, proper nouns, prepositions, helping verbs and conjunctions banned from the language dictionary yet? Have mercy, lord! I thought I had learned all there was to learn about grammar from Professor Higgins’s (My Fair Lady by George Bernard Shaw) teachings “In Hartford, Hertford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen.” Obviously, I have miles to go before I can even think about resting. (Sigh, sigh…..)

Social Studies – Okay, I know that the big, bad English people came a long time back to America to shoo away the natives and set up colonies. Hey, I watched Disney’s Pocahontas too, you know. But come on, how much information can you absorb from a cartoon movie? Is it my fault that Disney forgot to include important details of the Civil war and Declaration of Independence in its movie? Talk about irresponsibility!

Anyway, there it is finally. My homework woes for all the world to see. So knowing what you know about me now, would you call me smarter than my 4th grader? Before you answer, please do keep in mind that I hold a college degree from a very reputable educational institution. That has got to count for something, right?

In the company of greatness

It is August. You know what that means, don’t you? It is the time when parents of school age kids across the US, in frenzy, plot their first criminal offense of robbing a bank. How else can they stay afloat after buying the foot long supplies’ lists from their kids’ schools? I sympathized with every one of those moms and dads as I walked the aisles of Staples and Office Depot armed with my kids’ back-to-school supplies lists and a cart that looked like a grasshopper colony went overboard with its pre-winter ritual of stocking up food.

In addition to the familiar items on my yearly list of 10 large glue sticks, 6 pack index cards, 6 composition books, 2 pack loose-leaf college-ruled paper(not wide-ruled, mind you), folders with 2 pockets on the sides, 3 2” binders and a dozen #2 HB pencils, I had a new challenge this year.

My high school freshman’s list had a calculator. Not any drugstore calculator. A scientific calculator. The TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. My daughter uttered the name with such reverence that I, in turn, marched to the store and whispered it ever so softly to the store clerk who pleaded stomach flu and ran inside the doors that read ‘FOR EMPLOYEES ONLY’. Realizing that he wasn’t coming out anytime soon, I managed to locate it myself in an aisle filled with even more fantastic gadgets. This calculator, according to the flyer in the aisle, is the next best thing to sharing Albert Einstein’s gene pool as it could handle Trigonometry, Pre-calculus, Geometry, graphing and something else (the name of which eludes me now) that rhymes with suitability. I hope my daughter realizes how lucky she is. She can breeze through her high school years with absolutely no risk of a receding hairline.

Isn’t it just my luck that I had to be born in a decade when such technological advantages were unheard of in schools? While I sat cross-eyed with the strain of squeezing my poor little brain to manually calculate the sin of an angle of 72 degrees two decades ago, the kids in school today can simply punch up a function in this calculator and spit out the answer 0.9510565163 in under a second. Where is fairness, I ask you.

When I finished reading the box I was in awe. The TI-84 Plus sounded smart enough to sit for the SAT exams all by itself and ace them with a 5.0 GPA. Don’t quote me on this, but I think NASA used this palm-sized miracle to calculate Apollo 13’s return to a free return trajectory after the unfortunate accident in space all those years ago.

As I stood there in the aisle holding this calculator in my hand, it struck me. I was in the company of greatness. I held in my hand the century’s most phenomenal invention - a tiny box that held within itself the answers to all the science and math problems that had baffled the toughest minds of my time.

Placing the calculator in the shopping cart with a gentleness usually shown only by a first time dad holding his newborn baby, I joined the long row of parents at the cash counter.

Science for Dummies

Today I was browsing the Web and came across a whole category of books called ‘For Dummies e-books’. If you have ever wished that you had learned how to scrapbook, tie your shoes the right way, bake cookies that at least your dog will eat, the secret to growing a tomato plant that actually grows tomatoes or the right technique to scrub a toilet, I guarantee that there is a ‘For Dummies’ book out there for you. I can’t tell you what a relief this is to me. I can crawl into bed tonight and rest easy knowing that help is just a keystroke away.

The book heading my very long list is the ‘Science for Dummies’. I am tempted to let you believe that I have this insatiable thirst for knowledge and that I am trying to keep ahead of the curve in Modern Science. If I were Pinocchio, my nose could now be used to measure the double windows in the living room for new curtains. There is no dignified way to say this. Call me ‘Dumb and dumber’ when it comes to Science. It is true. My husband would vouch for it.

For years now, he has been trying to get me excited about Science. Short of dressing up like a molecule and twirling around the room, he has done all he can to get me to share his enthusiasm for the subject. Discovery, Scientific American, and National Geographic magazines are on our mailbox menu week after week. We have annual family membership to all Science Museums within 50 miles of our home.

After an hour perusing one of the Science magazines last week, he sat me down for a crash course in a new theory in Quantum Physics that the magazine was sporting as the main story that week. ‘But first let’s see if you remember what we talked about last week. Go ahead and tell me what a black hole is again.” To which I promptly replied that something was burning on the stove and ran into the Kitchen. “Did you forget already? Alright then. Let me explain again.” He said and proceeded to talk about concentrated areas of mass, gravitational pull, Sir. C.V Raman and Nobel Prize. At the mention of a fellow country man’s success and fame, his chest puffed out with pride.

Satisfied with my repeated promises to remember this vital piece of information this time around, he then initiated a family discussion about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the social debate involving Science and Religion. I tried my best to look intelligent and think Science.

I have GOT to get myself that ‘Science for Dummies’ book soon. It is an emergency.

-Meena Sankaran