What a chaotic situation at home last evening:

At 7:30, my daughter came to me for helping with her math--math matrices. I had nothing in my memory about this subject and had to read through 30 pages of her algebra II textbook for almost 1 hours. Finally, I had an idea about the subject, and then sit down with her to discuss her questions. Her first question was where the formula came from in the book? OMG--I had to re-read it and found no explanation. So I tried by myself to figure out, and explained to her. Then she showed me a homework sheet: transform a 3-dimension object to a 2-dimension one by matrixmethod. Daughter asked me to give her an example in real life! We are working under the dinning room light--it gave me a clue, the shadow! With the light source change positions (mimicing the arbitary matrix), our shadow would not be proportional on the wall! This finally made her happy and understand the homework. It took me more than one hour.

In the middle, son had trouble to understand his music notes--comfused about the quarter, half and whole notes with how many counts for each--he had a conceptual trouble. Took me 15 minutes to figure out what's the real problem, and then tried to explain to him. However, I did not think he got it completely. So I had to ask my wife to change the way he practiced. Hopefully he can work out soon.

I hope I did not gave my neighbor an impression that I was rude. She drove by to drop some harvest from her vegetable garden. I was in the middle of my daughter's homework. Briefly chatted with her and sent her out of my house.

Parenting is about patience. There is so much stress in our work already, We still have to face kid's education issues at home. It is hard, isn't it?

(9/15/2005)