'Sorry, but my dad
ate my homework'
Granted, she was doing math, which is not my strongest subject — I recall somewhere between trigonometry and calculus someone brought up imaginary numbers, and I basically gave up. Luckily I’ve never encountered an imaginary number in real life, unless you count my salary. But my wife and I have high hopes that our children will be more math-savvy, in order that they may never have to offer to analyze Proust for food.
And I’m happy to report that my daughter had no trouble with the problem that stumped me, which involved the difference between faces and flat surfaces on three-dimensional shapes. I figure she’s learning this because it’s on the MCAS test somewhere, unlike the things we learned in first grade, like how to make Christmas tree ornaments out of plastic bread-bag closers.
Even though I dodged that bullet, I came very close to having to admit that I didn’t know something, which goes against the parental code that’s in effect from your children’s birth to the moment they realize “Because I said so!” is not an explanation that would hold up to laboratory scrutiny. Luckily, these days we can distract kids with inappropriate cable television and find answers on the Internet, whereas our parents just had to make stuff up. (“Well honey, the sky is blue because it’s full of Smurfs,” etc.)
To his credit, my father helped my siblings and me with our homework all through school, and if I’m not mistaken is still smarting over the C+ my “sister” got on her book report about “Robinson Crusoe.” For fathers, of course, going overboard on such things is a longstanding tradition, from science projects to building cars for the Pinewood Derby — which, let’s face it, if left completely up to the Cub Scouts would feature primarily blocks of wood sporting plastic wheels attached with gum.
So if I’m to keep up this tradition, I’m thinking I may have to broaden my intellectual horizons. For instance, I’ve recently been reading “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” a book about the nature of space and time, and I’ve learned a lot from it — namely, you shouldn’t read a book called “The Fabric of the Cosmos” before bed unless you don’t mind having nightmares involving Einstein, Niels Bohr and “entropy,” whatever that is.
Meanwhile, I managed to get through that first little math scare and will hopefully do better on homework assignments going forward, particularly the ones that don’t involve cones and spheres. Fortunately, though, as it turns out my daughter had already come up with a backup plan should my counsel fall short of her elementary-school needs: “I can just ask Mom,” she said.
Great. If anybody needs me, I’ll be helping my son. He’s in preschool, and I think I can still manage some half-decent cutting along a curve.