Revised Column #1

"Googolplex WHAT?!"
A Day In The Life Of A Math Geek Mom

Public schools are great at making sure that no child is left behind, but what if your child is ahead? While intelligence is usually considered a blessing, it's really a challenge if you can't afford the luxury of a private education.

Our five-year-old is obsessed with math. It's like his brain never, ever, ever shuts down. He falls asleep singing numbers (“three-six-nine-twelve-fifteen-eighteeeen...”), and every morning at breakfast, before he's even fully awake, he's solving math questions that he poses to himself.

Like today. It's 7:30. I have a hard time doing anything that requires brain activity this early in the morning. What I need is coffee, and food. And silence.
“Mama, what's 48 times 2?”
Oh, gosh. But I do want him to figure it out on his own.
“What's 40 plus 40?” I reply, smiling encouragingly.
“Oh yeah, 80.”
“So what's 8 plus 8?”
“Oh yeah...so that's 96!” Fynn's super excited. I can see numbers running across the computer screen in his head.
Before I can take another sip of my coffee, he's already found a new problem that needs solving.
“Mama...”
I sigh.

Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely proud of him. I don't ever have to help him with any homework, which is nice, because I'm busy doing my own. But when he's jumping on our bed at 8 on a Sunday morning, yelling numbers into our dreams, we do get a little stressed out.

“FYNN! Why don't you go watch some TV?” snaps one of us, or, “Where's your Gameboy?”

That's bad, I know. But any parent will probably agree with me that there are moments when mind-numbing, “electrical nannies,” as my mom calls them, can save your life.

And yet, there are instances when I'm in complete shock at the kinds of things Fynn can do in his head, within seconds. The other day, we passed the country club on the way to school. Fascinated by their swimming pool, Fynn asked if we could go there, too. Not really knowing at all how much a membership is, I explained to him that that would cost at least 2oo dollars a month. “Wow, so that would be at least 2,400 dollars a year!” he replied without hesitating.

One time, Fynn asked me how many more days it was until my birthday. “Five,” I said. He immediately pulled out his calculator, typed in some numbers, and announced: “That's in 120 hours!” A few days before, we had talked about the amount of hours in a day, but I couldn't believe that he actually remembered the equation and understood how to apply it.

I really don't have a clue where he gets his genius. Not from me, that's for sure. I was happy to secure a painfully earned C- in my math finals in high school. Since then, I've tried to block out most of it. Simple eighth-grade algebra in my geography lab makes me sweat. My husband's mathematical skills are equally limited. He's already worried that we won't be able to help Fynn in math one day, but I'm thinking: help? He's already figured out what division is. By the time he gets to middle school, he'll probably know everything there is to know about algebra. I just wish they'd stick him in first- or second-grade math. In kindergarten, he's still anxiously awaiting the day that they will learn what 1 plus 1 is. And of course that's fine for most kids.

Really, I don't think kindergarten should be as academic as it is. When I was 5, I was in preschool coloring. (In Germany, everything before first grade is called preschool, and usually you don't learn your ABC's or numbers until you're 6 or 7 years old.) But I would probably go crazy with Fynn if it was like that here. Quite honestly, kindergarten isn't academic enough for Fynn. So, to keep him interested, his teacher has bought a chess game he gets to play as a reward for doing his journal writing each morning. But while this might have worked initially, it doesn't seem to excite him very much anymore. He's obviously bored if he comes home dying to do math, and prefers getting a new math book at Given's to a nice, new story book. But I don't know if I'm helping or sabotaging him when I buy third-grade multiplication books. I want to challenge him, but what if that creates an even bigger gap to the stuff he's doing in kindergarten? Will he be even more bored because I support his ambition?

And yes, I've wondered whether public school is the right place for him. Clearly, seven hours filled with stuff he can already do doesn't seem reasonable. Sure, he does learn some things, especially in science, but they happen too infrequently. Every time he comes home and tells me just one thing that excited him that day, I'm happy. But sometimes he talks about that one thing all week, and his usual answer to my question what he did in school is nothing but a tired shrugging, or a monotonous “I don't know.”

What makes things worse is that Fynn expects so much of himself. When he doesn't understand a question right away, he gets extremely frustrated, sometimes smacking himself. One day, while I was taking him to school, he was playing the usual counting-in-threes, posing-math-questions-to-himself game. Although he got everything except for one question right, that one wrong answer made him feel like a complete failure.

“I'm just not good with numbers,” he grumbled.

I couldn't believe that he would be so hard on himself. I assured him that he was absolutely amazing and great with math, but even after I had tried to convince him in every way possible that he was smart, he cautiously asked: “Do you really mean that, Mama?” (Of course he knows that I'm proud of pretty much anything he does, so he had to make sure.)

Sometimes, he refuses to let us help him with a problem, and it happens frequently that he breaks out in hysterical sobbing because something doesn't turn out as perfect as he hoped. I find myself praising him more than one would deem healthy, just to make him feel half-way confident about his incredible skills. I try to tell him that nobody expects him to know any of the things he's eagerly learning, but Fynn has his own expectations, and there doesn't seem to be much I can do. Occasionally, though, I catch myself wishing he was a completely average five-year-old excited about kindergarten, and happier playing outside than solving math questions. It would make things so much easier.

If I don't want Fynn to become completely apathetic, or frustrated and obnoxious, something needs to happen. But until I graduate from college and find a job that pays well, we simply can't afford the thousands of dollars per year it takes to pay for a private school. The only realistic solution seems to be to move to a bigger city with a more diverse public school system. Many public schools have started to integrate Montessori concepts into their curricula, thus allowing for more individualized attention. Right now, however, we have to deal with a standardized system that ensures that no child is left behind, while failing to attend to those that are ahead.

It's 7:58. I tell Fynn that he really needs to stop doing math and get ready for school. With a slightly panicked glance at the digital clock on our stove, Fynn replies: “Oh no, has it already been 180 seconds?!”