She can Spell "Arithmetic" just fine

Last night I was helping Erika with her math homework. I know from experience that this can be difficult because her strengths are more in the language arts fields and arithmetic seems so irrelevant to her. I don’t remember NOT getting it, it just seems intuitive. This combination makes for a bad teacher and a disinterested student.

Last night the task was converting fractions to decimals. For me this is batting average math and I just know that 3/8 is .375. How do you teach that? How do you do that?  I thought real hard and remembered that this is a division problem, 8 divided by 3. Numerator inside the dealie-bop and denominator outside. She likes this, a process, steps to follow. I tried to instill a “sanity check” afterwards, like does 9/20ths seem like it would be your quotient, .45, or just under half?

Blank stare.

“What is half of 20?” I asked.

After some figuring she guesses, “10?”

“Yes 10, and 9 is just below 10, so we would expect that 9/20 would give us something just below half, right?”

“Sure, if you say so.”

“0.45 is just below .5, which is half, right?”

“Dad, just tell me the answer. Is it .5, .45, or 10?”

I’m happy to report that we did make some progress. By the end of our session she could tell me the decimal equivalents to every “eighth” interval without doing long division. For a mastery check I asked her one third. She said .3 repeating. Very good. What about two thirds? She ventured .6 repeating? VERY good, maybe she’s getting it. Then she continued the test on her own, saying, “Three thirds is .9 repeating, and four thirds is .12 repeating.”

Oy.