My Son’s Brain Is Weird

Here in Aqaba, a coastal town in Jordan which is gunning for second city status but has all the verve and vigour of Bournemouth on a wet weekend, our attention has turned to the bane of our travel life, which is maths.

It should, probably, be obvious that world travel, combined with books, the odd bit of writing and arts and music classes where available, provides an absolutely fantastic education in most areas.

The problem, of course, is maths. Not least because my spawn has decided he wants to learn physics.

Now, given our struggles with long division and fractions, this might seem like an odd choice.

But Z actually has a really scientific mind.

I don’t.

So last year, we acquired a tutor – a former science teacher, travelling with his own family, who was happy to teach Z to his own bizarre level with an unschooling approach.

To unpick “bizarre” a little?

Z is quite happy to deal with problems in scientific notation, coefficients, exponents and complex probabilities involving pi. He will bollock on about subatomic particles, Keynesian economics, inverse proportionality and grey goo apocalypses until the cows come home, but remains (whisper it) not the world’s most solid on his times tables.

Anywise, Paul was great.

Z learned. Z learned A LOT.

And, even better, I had nothing to do with it.

Three of my cousins and one of Z’s uncles are engineers of various kinds. I stopped all the sciences I could aged 12, and have already taught Z all I can remember of GCSE chemistry, which isn’t very much.

Unfortunately, Paul’s travels ended. And with them the tuition.

Leaving us staring at each other in horror. Or, as Z put it, “Mum. We need a new maths tutor. You can’t actually do it.”

“We could do Mathletics?” I say.

“I hate Mathletics,” he says. “Mathletics represents everything that is wrong with the conventional educational model.”

“Well,” I say. “It’s Mathletics or me.”

“No,” he says. “You need to find me a tutor.”

Now, travelling maths teachers, or maths teachers who understand travelling, aren’t the easiest to find.

So I gave maths my best shot.

It started well, with Pythagoras, which even I can cope with. And then I thought, given we were in Egypt, we could do some problems around pyramids.

“Right!” I say confidently. “You are building a pyramid with a base 100m square, ascending at a 45 degree angle. Don’t worry about the facing, it’s a stepped pyramid. Work out how tall it will be, and how many blocks you’ll need to build it, with each block being a metre cubed.”

Silence for a while. He calculates the height.

Then: “Is there any quicker way to do this than just working out 100 squared and 99 squared and adding it all up?”

“Yes!” I say, confidently. “It’s like compound interest. Just use that formula.”

“It’s not like compound interest,” he says. “And anyway, I’ve forgotten that formula.”

“OK,” I say. “I think it’s a recursive equation. Or possibly an algorithm.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Mum?” he says.

I turn to Wikipedia, which lists a bewildering variety of equations, none of them the one I think I’m looking for, then Wolfram Alpha which would be bloody excellent if I knew anything about the subject I was researching.

Then Twitter, where I handily find an astrophysicist. Yvette politely enquires how good his calculus is – “Oh!” I say, “Is THAT what calculus is? I never did it at school.” — then directs us to a page with the relevant formula (which is, fact fans, a summation).

Z solves it. He solves the next two. And there, again, it rests.

In Alexandria, conveniently enough, a blogger friend suggests we meet up with some friends of his – one of whom, it emerges, is studying electrical engineering and tutors SAT and pre-SAT maths in his spare time.

Result! Particularly Z is currently interested in the engineering side of physics.

After assessing what Z can do, Fady decides to teach him using a first-year undergraduate mechanics textbook, full of terrifying looking equations with Δ in and a lot of italics floating around like alphabet soup.

Two lessons go well. Z is rattling off definitions of things like velocity versus speed and talking about stuff like relative position.

And then comes homework.

Which Fady appears to be under the impression I can help with if required…

Z is staring, brow furrowed, at a page of problems along the lines of “An arrow can fly as fast as 100m/s if you exclude friction. If someone shoots an arrow in the air, how high will it rise? And at what time will it reach peak height?”

“What’s the problem?” I ask.

“I can’t do it,” he says. “I feel stupid.”

“Well,” I say. “Show me the equations you’ve been using and tell me what they mean.”

He does so. This takes a bit of time. “The problem is,” he says. “I’m only allowed to use these four equations.”

“Well,” I say. “Can’t you use that one? You know the initial velocity, don’t you? And you know the one about gravity and freefalling objects and acceleration?”

“YES!” he says. “But TIME is on the BOTTOM in that equation.”

“Well, factor it out,” I say.

“What?” he says.

“Factor it out!” I say. “Move the equation around so time’s on the left hand side. It’s on the bottom, so you need to times by it… Times everything by time and that takes it out of the fraction.”

“No,” he says. “I’ve got my own method of doing it.”

Time passes. “Don’t worry, Mum,” he says. “I’ve worked out how to do it.”

“You can’t possibly do that without the equation,” I say. “And you need to show your workings. Write out the equation. Move it around. Then fill in the values and calculate it.”

“I’ve done it on a calculator,” he says, showing me an answer that looks plausible.

“But what’s your reasoning?” I say. “You need to use the equation and SHOW that you have used the equation.”

“Look, Mum,” he says. “It’s just logic.”

It gets shouty.

And, shortly after it gets shouty, the problem dawns on me.

And the problem is that my son’s brain is weird.

Because he can read, comprehend and use all sorts of really gnarly-looking equations, full of letters like Δ and Σ — and coped fine with the US 8th grade maths tests that we used to assess him for Paul — both Fady and I assumed he understood algebra.

In fact, while he can understand and use these equations, he doesn’t actually have the basic algebra to manipulate them on paper, the kind of stuff that even I can manage.

“AND WHY’S THAT, MUM?” he says. “BECAUSE NOBODY’S BLOODY TAUGHT ME.”

Homework, this week, is equations. And that’s being a real bundle of joy, I can tell you.

For the record, all the answers he reached without showing his workings were, indeed, correct. And I pity the poor sod who teaches him for GCSE. Which he will be taking, I guess, in roughly five years’ time.