What are 3 questions this weeks reading raised for you?Our teacher gave us one of those tricky problems, and I had no idea how to do it. I sat for a whole hour staring into my book and racking my brains, but nothing helped. Also, I was terribly sleepy. Then my eyes were smarting as if someone had thrown sand into them.
“That’s enough,” Mom said. “It’s time for bed. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”
“But I have not done my problem yet!”
“You ought to have done it before,” said Mama. “It’s no good sitting up late like this. You’ll never learn anything that way. Your head doesn’t work properly when you’re tired.”
“He must stay up until he finishes”, said Dad. “Next time he will not dare to leave his homework undone so late.”
And so I sat and read the problem over and over until the figures began to shake and wiggle and hide behind one another as if they were playing hide-and-seek. I rubbed my eyes and tried to read the problem over again, but the letters kept jumping up and down.
“What’s the trouble?” Mom asked.
“It’s the problem,” I said. “The beastly thing simply won’t work out.”
“It’s not the problem’s fault, it’s the pupil’s.”
Mom read the problem and began telling me how to do it, but for some reason I couldn’t understand anything.
“Don’t they explain the problems to you in school?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said. “They don’t.”
“That’s strange! When I went to school, the teacher always explained the problem first in class and then gave us examples to do at home.”
“Maybe that’s how it was when you went to school, but our teacher never explains anything. She makes us do everything ourselves.”
“Well, that sounds strange to me.”
“Yes, it is strange,” I said.
“What did you do during the arithmetic lesson?”
“We did a problem on the blackboard.”
“Let’s see that problem.”
I showed him the problem I had copied into my note-book from the blackboard.
“But it’s exactly the same as the one she gave you to do at home!” exclaimed Dad. – “And you go complaining about the teacher! This shows that she did tell you how to do the problem.”
“It isn’t the same,” I said. “That one is about carpenters building a house, and this one here is about tinsmiths making pails.”
“You silly boy,” concluded Dad. “In the first problem you had to find out how many days it took 25 carpenters to build 8 houses, and in this one you must find out how long it took 6 tinsmiths to make 36 pails. Both problems are solved in exactly the same way.”
Dad began explaining how to do the problem, but my head was so fuzzy that I couldn’t make anything out.
Dad finally lost patience, “How can you be so stupid?!”
My Dad isn’t very good at explaining problems. Mom says he hasn’t any pedagogical ability, which means he wouldn’t be any good as a school-teacher. He usually begins quietly enough, but after a while he gets irritated and starts shouting at me. And then my head stops working altogether, and I sit there like a dummy.
“I don’t see what is unclear,” he said. “It’s all as clear as daylight.”
Whenever Dad sees that explaining won’t help, he snatches a bit of paper and begins doing the problem himself. “Look,” he said. “Look how easy it is. Now, what must we find out first?”
I watched while he worked out the first part of the problem on a slip of paper.
“Is it clear?”
To tell the truth it wasn’t the least bit clear, but I was so sleepy that I pretended I understood.
“There, you see!” said Dad, quite pleased. “You only need to use your brain a little and everything will be as easy as a piece of cake.”
Then he solved the second part of the problem. “Understand now?”
“Yes,” I fibbed.
“Are you sure you do? Because if you don’t, I can try to explain again.”
“No, it’s quite clear.”
I thought he would never finish the awful problem. But at last he did, and I quickly copied the whole solution into my notebook, put it into my backpack and went off to bed.
