Erin has started doing "bedtime math" with Owen, in addition to the normal bedtime stories. We also solve math puzzles (word problems) the car from time to time. I've been noticing that Owen has the ability to work out some pretty complicated problems in his head. The other day in the car I asked him "If we can travel 60 miles in one hour, how many minutes does it take us to go 90 miles?" He thought for about 15 seconds and then surprised me by saying "90 minutes."

It occurred to me that he had in place the basic tools for algebra. Since I'm also working on helping him deal with challenges, the other night I decided to give him some algebra problems. I told him I'd give him 10 points for each problem he solved, expecting him to get something like 30 points, tops. I'd then use that as inspiration for learning how to do the other problems. To my surprise, he got 9 out of 9 for 90 points:

He's only 6.8 years old. What have I created?!

While this is nice and all, it dawned on me that Owen will likely pass me up in math ability well before he reaches college. I better start practicing my multidimensional calculus now...

Megan said…
I know what you mean! Katie just participated in first grade math bowl, competing against other area schools. I was surprised at the ones they got right, and how quickly! We are definitely going to have to brush up on our own skills as she gets older.

Way to go, Owen! Those are some complex problems to solve!!!
mama mia said…
Wow! He has some innate ability, PLUS, someone who values math and talks about it regularly...remember how early he played with that sesame street phone and recognized numbers? I had to think hard about some of those problems myself...glad I just teach kindergarten, but guess I better step up the word problem and problem solving questions! Surprised he already knows to multiply or divide in your equations!

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…