Tween Angst
You don’t understand anything!
And with that, she turned and stomped her way up to her room, using the door for punctuation.
With the birth of a daughter, I have known for the past eight years that this time would come. The time when my daughter, like her mother before her, like all daughters, would accuse me of being unable to understand her problems. I have been steeling myself for this since the moment she was born. My passionate, dark-haired beauty, my Poppyseed.
What I didn’t expect, aside from the fact that I thought we had a few more years before such accusations, was that the subject matter would not be boys or clothes or mean girls, but…wait for it…mathematics.
A-raze! A-raze! Don’t you know about a-raze?!?
A-raze? A raise? Rays? To what could she possibly be referring. I scrambled to connect some mathematical function with what she kept screeching in frustration. Coming up empty, I went immediately to the computer to find a tutorial.
I knew how do it.
I just didn’t know it had a name.
Frume Sarah is Shabbos-observant -- in a Reform way, that is. Please note that from Friday afternoons until one hour after sundown on Saturday evenings, Frume Sarah will be unavailable, in observance of the Jewish Sabbath.
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Frume Sarah's World 
It’s sad when the internet has to help us interpret what our children are saying. If I had a quarter for every time we’ve had to look something up due to a tiny miscommunication…
That made me laugh! It’s pretty funny that she would say that to you about a math problem.
Don’t you hate when schools use different language than we did back in the day? 😉
Main sentence vs. topic sentence.
Main idea vs. thesis statement.
Oy.
Oh, please feel free to send Poppyseed over to our EdibleTorah HQ. Not only to do have older role models (age 20 and 16) who will help her understand the massive in-effectiveness of her door-slamming tactic, but – being a computer geek – I would LOVE to talk to her all about arrays… and variables, hashes (arrays with a key field), arrays OF arrays, and sooooo much more.
A few weeks ago my nine-year-old nephew was solving a multiplication problem and, while I admit that I was never much of a math student, I had NO idea what he was doing…or the logic behind it. So, I did it the “old fashioned” way and, much to my surprise, we both came up with the same answer. Who knew?!