I was never very good at math. Alternatively, my brother graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and went on for a master’s degree in fuel science, so yeah, he’s pretty good at math.
When I was in about 4th grade, my dad noticed my math skills were lackluster and needed a boost. So he bought a math workbook from the book section in our local grocery store. Then he bought another one.
Eventually, he had to start buying them at the local teachers’ supply store because we had exhausted the grocery store’s supply. And even when that wasn’t enough, for one whole summer vacation, I’d wake up and sit down for breakfast only to see a yellow. legal. tablet. Two to three pages of hand-scrawled math problems that my dad created while drinking his morning coffee.
And his excessive good parenting didn’t stop there.
For years, my parents would load all three of us up every Saturday to visit my grandparents who lived about 45 minutes away. My dad would pass a box to my brother, as sneakily as a high-roller palming the doorman a tip, and say, “Here. Practice with Heidi.” And my brother would be doomed to spend 45 minutes quizzing me on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division flashcards in the back of the station wagon.
Now, aside from the fact that my brother is a supergenius, he’s also 5 years older than I am. So imagine a 14-year-old quizzing a 9-year-old on basic math when he’s doing high school, honors-level algebra. Yikes.
As if that wasn’t enough torture for either of us, my dad also noticed I couldn’t grasp the concept of counting money. Which meant…when we’d load up in the station wagon, he’d palm my brother some dollar bills and a handful of change and say, “Here. Practice making change with Heidi.”
After a few years and dozens of trips to Dra and Pop’s, thankfully I eventually got the hang of it.
Then I started bringing home unacceptable grades in social studies (a C-, if anyone is curious), which warranted long talks about how I wasn’t “reaching my potential.” Ironically enough, my sister is now a social studies TEACHER, so back in the day, I wasn’t getting any sympathy from my parents or sister about how hard social studies was either.
Fearing another dreadful family intervention, I attempted to take it in my own hands and try to study with the most patient person in the house.
I’d bring home my social studies book and, while my mom folded laundry, I’d whisper, “Mom? Can you help me study for my test tomorrow?”, hoping against hope that my dad in the next room wouldn’t overhear and step in.
And time after time, my mom would yell, “JOHN! Heidi needs help studying.”
Throwing me to the dogs, just like that.
And so, an hour of pure torture would start. My dad would find the chapter and start reading aloud. From the first word to the last word of the chapter, he’d read. Would I be taking copious notes? Suddenly absorbing information that previously hadn’t stuck in my head? No. I’d be counting the keys on our piano. Playing with the tassels on the rug. Noticing how many sentences it took before my dad cleared his throat in a serious of three eh-eh-HEM coughs.
I vividly remember looking longingly at my mom and her giant laundry piles, pleading with my eyes to make this stop. She’d wink and be off, free, walking around the house without being shackled to this stupid history book.
The worst part is that, inevitably, my dad would come to the end of the chapter and see the review questions.
I should note that unlike my dad, I don’t have a nearly-photographic memory. Hearing something or reading it once is never enough. I need to read, repeat, understand, and find meaning to what I’ve read. I need to use pneumonic devices and memory tricks to remember names/dates/places/terms. Alternately, if you ask me about a conversation we had 8 years ago, I can tell you what was said and what you were wearing. But that’s hardly helpful on a 4th grade social studies test.
So it would go that my dad would ask me a question, I’d stare dumbly like a goat, and after some insistent prodding, shrug my shoulders and say dejectedly, “I dunno.” Then my dad would say, “Heidi…I just READ IT TO YOU. ” Then he’d go back, reread the paragraph, I’d zone out again, and the cycle would continue until I’d end up crying and running to my room saying, “I DON’T KNOW, DAD!”
Years later, I asked my mom, a terrible student herself, about it and she said, “Oh Heidi! I had no idea how to study! To pick out the terms and ask you about them. To go through the questions at the end and find where they related to the text, that was completely beyond me. I’m so sorry. I’d hear you in the other room with dad and I’d just cringe because I couldn’t remember what he just read either!”
Luckily, spelling and English were my saving graces. I’d bring home my spelling words and ask my mom to review them with me, which she would. Looking back, I have to laugh because she’s an even worse speller than she is a student of social studies, so who knows how many I actually got right.
Moral of the story, try to have kids consecutively smarter than the last one so THEY can tutor each other. Or so that you think you’re just doing a really, really great job contributing to the gene pool.
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