Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

“MK, how’s your math going? Let’s see your work.” I look at the page, filled with doodle work—and this is a child who really doesn’t care to draw.

“Upstairs. There’s a toilet with your name on it that needs to be cleaned.”

We had a little chat this evening about choices. We once again explain to MK his choices: do his math work and other school work without wasting time, or do janitorial work around the house. He said he’d rather do his math. We’ll see tomorrow what he chooses.

SK really surprised me this afternoon. SK spent several hours at the library studying Science Olympiad material, MK met a friend who took him to her home for an afternoon of socialization play, and I surfed the net. Late in the afternoon we left the library and headed off to pick up MK when SK shocked me. It seems he now loves math. He added that he figures he got that math love from me, and his love of building things from his Dad. Geez, isn’t he a teenager? Aren’t teenagers supposed to want to disassociate themselves from their parents and reject what their parents like?

What a sweet kid! It pleases me more though to know that he is in love with math, that it is making sense to him. You see this is a child who just last year, and numerous times over the previous years, chanted, yelled, expressed with joy how he HATED math. What a turn-around. It seems that learning Algebra helped SK to see that math makes sense, that it is all just adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Simple stuff that finally so made sense to him. Maybe there is hope that MK will turn-around too.