Is my son a math whiz? I guess it depends on when you're looking.

 

He's the kind of kid who will fuss and complain and whine that his math homework is too hard, and then after fifteen minutes of fighting sit down and do the problems in minutes, quickly and correctly. Last night, at a family math workshop at his school, he sat and struggled and counted on his fingers and came up with wrong answers when I asked him to do math equations, but when a friend across the table struggled with his sums, my boy shouted out the right answers without a second thought. His child study team leader reports that when she tested him in math, he sometimes made mistakes when the problems involved carrying into the hundreds and thousands column; which sounds bad, until you realize that before that test, he'd never done addition with hundreds and thousands columns. And that his writing is so messy, he could have had the correct answers and she would never have known.

 

Is my son a math whiz? Maybe. It would be nice to think so. And even nicer if he wanted to act like one.