Time-tests in math class are still a thing, for some reason. It must be important to know how to do arithmetic quickly. Apparently the universe wants to negate that last sentence because I spelled "arithmetic" seven different incorrect ways before getting it right.
In Lyla's class, you have to get 50/50 correct for three Tuesdays in a row before you get moved to the next kind of math. Many kids are still hacking away at addition, while a handful are getting clobbered by subtraction. When Lyla graduated subtraction, she came home worried.
"What if next Tuesday I don't get very many multiplication problems right, and other kids see?" Second grade logic at its finest.
"Lyla, some of these kids struggle to add their own fingers together. You're the only kid on multiplication, right?"
"Yeah."
"So, even if you get every single problem wrong, you're still the most mathematically proficient human in the room. Not that anybody cares."
"Yeah, but."
Checkmate. No arguments hold water against an 8-year-old's "yeah, but." So Julie made her a bunch of multiplication tables, and Lyla taped them by her bed. At dinner each night, we analyzed various scenarios. And for the next three consecutive Tuesdays, Lyla aced the multiplication time-tests. You'd think she'd end-zone spike the test on her teacher's desk or mic-drop her pencil, but she hardly even talked about it. At some point, time-tests stopped feeling like a big deal to her--which is what time-tests should be: not a big deal.
So now she's pretty chill about division, and I couldn't be happier about that. If we even remember to ask her on a Tuesday afternoon how the time-test went, she'll say she got 28 or 30 out of 50, and then she'll nonchalantly change the subject.
But I do take a certain paternal pride that her teacher struggled to actually locate a division time-test; she'd never had a kid graduate multiplication. And I can say that without sounding boastful because clearly Lyla doesn't get it from me. I can barely spell arithmetic.
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