Duuuuuhhhhhhhh

I’ve relearned a lot over the years by helping my twins with their homework.
In social studies, I got reacquainted with explorers like Hernando De Soto and Amerigo Vespucci. History is fun; I can handle history.
In science, I learned about electrical circuits as they wired a “house” made of shoeboxes. Very cool.
Then I remembered that I never really mastered the times tables beyond, oh, the sevens. Things get really foggy for me around 7x8. And I don't think anyone calls them "times tables" anymore.
So when they were about three months into the fourth grade and brought home two-digit division problems and pages with fractions on them, I hit a wall and had to say something I never wanted to hear myself saying.
“Uh, you’re just going to have to wait until Dad gets home to find out how to do this.”
See, our house is like one of those “House Divided” license plates, where one half is an orange UT logo and the other half is a crimson Alabama logo. If I were to have a “House Divided” plate, though, it would have a division symbol on one half and a schwa on the other half. Remember phonics?
My husband covers anything that involves numbers, and I am the house expert in the written word. I’m fine with that set-up because I’ve wanted to specialize in the written word since I was my kids’ age. With a journalism degree and a master’s in English education, I just assumed my mad writing skillz would carry me to a place where the hired help would handle the numbers for me.
It’s humbling to find that you’re obsolete by the time your children are in fourth grade.
It’s kind of like that feeling you get when you glance at the nutrition label on a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream and realize they intended that pint to contain four servings, not one.
Fortunately, I have a niece and some nephews nearby who are math geniuses, and I can call them for backup the next time Henry has to determine the area of something shaped like Texas.
I should have called the cousin homework hotline the time Mason had to answer this one: “What do we measure when determining weight that we don’t measure when determining mass?” I would have put, “Depends on how many servings of Haagen-Dazs you eat.”
Perhaps our new president will formulate an initiative called “No Parent Left Behind.”