X = High School Math

When Addison was in first grade and we started homeschooling, people sometimes asked, "What will you do when it comes to high school math and science? There's no way I could teach that." I responded that I was once a math major, and I really wasn't that worried about classes that were still eight or ten years away.

Perhaps I underestimated what I'd forget in the fifteen years between my college calculus classes and my little girl growing up to be a high schooler.

Thankfully I still remember a lot of algebra. I need it both to help Brennan with his Algebra I homework and to figure out if Addison's calculus answers are correct.

It's been a long time since I sat in college calculus classes. Even though I cannot figure out the problems myself any more, I can still look at the solutions in the teacher's manual and do the algebraic manipulations to determine if the answers on Addison's assignment matches the one given in the answer key. Sometimes I can even figure out where she made a mistake in her calculations.

Grading her papers is only part of the equation, though. Sometimes she has higher-level mathematics questions that either I can't answer or that I can't find the time to figure out. Thankfully, God placed people in our lives that are gifted in mathematics.

We attend a small church, but it has a lot of smart people. When I don't know the answer, I tell her to find one of the engineers to see if they know the answer. Addison sat with two of the men in our small group this evening discussing the idea of graphing imaginary numbers. Sometimes I think they enjoy her questions.

On a recent youth group trip, she found out that the volunteer youth minister at another local church teaches college math. A few weeks ago, I told Addison just to email someone for help when she started talking about higher level math concepts that I just can't remember any more.

Addison thinks she'll continue calculus next year, perhaps trying to take the AP Calculus B/C exam next Spring. I'm thankful that she'll have friends to turn to along the way. I'm even more thankful that she's not solely relying on me to teach math anymore.

When faced with this week's blogging through the alphabet idea of X equals something, I couldn't help but think of all the algebra equations I've worked this past week. So X = High School Math in my book.

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