The light goes on...the light goes on

With the start of school last week, one of my dear children made it their solemn vow to complain about the completely rediculous task of having to learn how to multiply numbers. Complaints would start even before feet would touch the floor in the morning, and last until right after homework in the evening. Even if the homework had nothing to do with math. Like the assignment: Tell Me All About You. The response, delivered while draped across the kitchen chair, "I can't do times tables."

Well last night we, notice I said we, had our first math homework assignment. It was on BIG NUMBERS. The directions were to count out at least five groups of objects where the population count would be between 100 and 1,000. My quiet internal response to reading this was, OH PLEASE! Don't make me count to a thousand. Finally, I was making time for my book (Remember I'm supposed to be writing a book?), and this assignment without the use of multiplication was going to take forever.

I smiled. "Get started and if you need me, I'm here."

The stairs in the house were counted. Thank GOD we don't have over 100 stairs in the house.

The DVDs were counted. Three shelves. First she tried counting all of them, but got lost. I suggested she count one shelf, and then add that number to itself three times. Task completed.

Then the holes in a rectangular plastic pin cushion. My heart sunk. There is no way we can count all those holes. By herself she'd lose count or lose her place. And I wasn't sitting there for an hour counting.

"Why don't we count the holes in two lines and then count up how many sets of lines there are.
1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8....... 30 holes

And the number of two line sets: 24.

I set up the multiplication problem, 24 time 30, then asked, "What's the answer when you multiply zero by anything?"

Answer, "One."

"No, zero."

"OH." I saw a flicker. The information was noted and rightly stored.

"What is the answer of 4 + 4 + 4?"

(Bring out little fingers here.) "Twelve"

"Right, Four times three is 12. And next what is three plus three plus the one we had to carry?"

(NO fingers this time.) "Seven."

"Right again, three two times is six, then plus the one to be seven. So how many holes are there in this pin cushiony toy?"

"Seven hundred and twenty." All smiles.

"Yes, and you did multiplication!"

The heavenly lights shown down, angels sang, trumpets trumpeted and she did ten more counting exercises than required. All due to the power of multiplication.

There is a God, and he/she loves math. And hopefully my children will too.