Math Homework

Growing up I found I had an extreme dislike for math; especially in jr. high and high school. Math was a subject that seemed so abstract. It was a subject about numbers that had very little connection with my reality.

Then I graduated from high school and after goofing off for a while I went to a technical college. I studied instrumentation with a heavy emphasis on electronics. All of my math classes had a direct correlation to my field of study so most of the math problems I solved related to electronics. This opened an incredible world to me and I started digging math. Math was no longer just numbers on a page but it had a solid relation to something I could observe. After tech school I went to work in my field of study and math was a fun part of my job.

Tonight my son Jakeb brought home a math paper where he had to find the surface area, circumference and volume of different geometrical shapes. I know now that math has relevance but I thought I was finished with math homework when I got out of school. Not only did I have to refresh my memory about how to do geometry (pi d? "no, that's circumference." or pi r-square times length? "Yeah, that's volume of a cylinder." ), I also had to convince Jake I knew what I was talking about.

And when it comes down to it, I really don’t care how many times a lawn roller with a diameter of 9 inches will rotate across a 40-foot lawn.