Date Night

It was Saturday night and everyone was in bed after a busy day of umpiring, chauffeuring, cooking, a baseball game, dining with family, entertaining guests and my husband and I decide to (pause, wait for it) do algebra in bed.  Yep, that’s right.  You heard me right.   At 10:35PM everyone was asleep and listening to their radios when I snuck back into my son’s room and grabbed his homework to take a look at the two problems he was stuck on.  I’m a college graduate. I know how to add and subtract. I understand the standard order of operations rule. I wasn’t about to let little x’s and y’s take me down without a fight.  

I tossed the worksheet and his “study guide” onto the bed and took a quick bath, dabbed on some perfume and told my husband that there were two problems our 8th grader was stuck on and wanted to see if I could help him out.   Before I knew it, we were both sitting in bed with the worksheet in between us grabbing pencils and paper trying to figure out how to write a system of equations with two variables from a word problem. 

We each took the same approach and tried our hand at solving it alone, each in our little space of the bed (secretly trying to outsmart each other by coming up with the solution first).   We knew what the answers were, but to write them in an algebraic expression using two variables was a different story.  No easy task when you haven’t done algebra in thirty-some odd years.

We laughed and talked about it, erased and started over a few times.  Laughed some more.  Discussed the high expectations of eighth grade these days, reminisced about our school days and laughed some more. Finally, with neither of us solving it on our own, we googled the term “system of equations” and within 45 seconds, we had our answer.  (A special thanks and shout-out to our good friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin - the founders of Google.  We love you guys.)

It wasn’t dinner and a movie (and making popcorn next time might not be a bad idea), but we had a good time and in the end, we finished the problems. (And, for the record, I don’t think it officially counts as doing your child’s homework because he didn’t ask us to do it.  So, I think we’re off the hook in that regard.)  For us, it wasn’t about picking a movie or a restaurant, it was just simply hanging out together, laughing and enjoying a modern date night, the algebra way!