Made me smile

I tutor math in the morning. I have about 5-8 kids who rotate through my class and come an hour before school four days a week to do math with me. I treat them well, we do breakfast every so often. I mean, they are getting up early to do math. It has been great to see some of them finally catch a concept they’ve been completely missing for so long. Today was a day like that.

Right now we are doing multiplication and division problems. I have a bucket of blocks that they can count out into groups for the problems if they want. On Tuesday they had to count out 144 blocks for one of the problems and then divide them into 12 groups. That took a while. So when they got to a similar problem today, they were going to have 162 blocks (today they represented cookies) and divide them into six groups.

One boy who has been working with me all year started to count them out. First he was incredulous that he was going to have to count that many. He didn’t look too thrilled about that. He started counting, but didn’t get to far. He then turned to me and asked if there wasn’t an easier way. He knew there had to be some other way to do division than counting out th blocks and putting them in piles.

Yippy!! The desire to learn!

So I showed him how to work it out on paper. He was much happier about that. Then the other kids realized they didn’t have to count out the blocks either and wanted to be shown how else they could do it. Now that they know there is a simplier, quicker way, we’ll start working on the details of how to do it and getting lots of practice.

But I’m just so excited for him. He’s the best kid in the world right now.