Counting on Fingers and Polished Little Toes

Luckily the little tulips I painted on my toenails during my week of horror in a Guatemalan hospital are still holding up. The boy has been studying for his Honors Algebra final, and in assorted fits of exhaustion I was forced to kick off my wedge heels (or grubby Crocs, depending on the day), while I helped him work through his math. Mommy count on her little piggies after several solid weeks of virtually no sleep, yes mommy do. Praise Newton and Liebniz (the two co-inventors of calculus) that English grammar was not on the study list.

Also thank God we're on a base 10 system, as opposed to the base 20 or vigesimal (which the Mayans and a few other cultures used) or base 60 (which originated with the Sumerians in the third century B.C.). We get our sixty seconds in a minute from the base 60, or sexagesimal system, by the way. Talk about telling time old school! They are also significantly more complicated to have to deal with, unless you're carrying around a few extra fingers and toes that I'd love to borrow. Aside from the sleep deprivation, geeky as it sounds, I must admit, I do love math; exponents are especially soothing. I can't wait until he gets to Trig, so I can bliss-out in my quasi-Aspie yummy-nummy number state.

As for today's exam, this was the first final that couldn't just be done on line. We had to get the final, print it out, have my son do the work, and then scan the final and also all scratch paper used. All this had to be done, mind you, on the last day of the month; otherwise I'd have to pay for another month of classes just to do the damn final. We're taking next month off from math to focus on other subjects, plus are heading to an even less developed country where internet access is apparently as scarce as reputable hospitals are here, so there isn't much point in working on math for the month. (Yes, I will explain the whole traumatic hospital tale later on. My laptop will burst into flame if I type what's on my mind at this point.)

At home, I could happily print and scan in about a minute flat. Here, it took endless discussions, a mini-marathon through the streets of Antigua looking for an internet cafe that had ever heard of the futuristic device called a scanner, and lengthy explanations that I actually needed by material scanned by close of business today, not sometime next week, as was the preferred option of most of the cafes. Dear Stanford, in case you're reading, it would have been faster for me to trek up to the highlands, take a crash course in back-strap weaving, and then create my very own hand-woven huipile (a traditional Mayan woman's blouse) with the answers clutched in the blood-soaked beaks of zenophobic Quetzals (national bird of Guatemala).

The boy is now in Intermediate Tenth Grade Algebra in Stanford's gifted children's program, not bad for a fifth grader. He's looking forward to the Computer Science and Physics courses he can take now, and wants to add Chemistry after he finishes Intermediate Algebra. Time to grow some more appendages!

Please check out my home-schooling blog if you're interested in how to handle these subjects with your kids, or are curious about homeschooling in general. I just started it, so bear with me as I get it up and wobbling: http://internationalhomeschooling.blogspot.com/.

I briefly enrolled the boy in a private school in Mexico, but he was several grades ahead of the children his age in everything except Spanish, and was used to learning in smaller, less-regimented classes than the school offered, so it was not an ideal match. The sanitary hand-washing dispensers at the entrance of the school to combat swine flu, not to mention the rigid check-ins, gates, and locked and guarded doors to prevent kidnapping, were a bit of a downer too. So for now it's just me, Stanford, and my body weight in academic books. Who needs a gym when you have homeschooling textbooks to lug around the world? They also make great pillows for the occasional desperate stay in a dodgy hostel.