February 2, 2015

So this week, probably the most exciting thing was we went to an orphanage to do service, which was basically playing games with the kids and helping them with homework.  Well, I helped them with homework.  Everyone else played games with the kids.  Well, I asked the girl what homework she had, she showed it to me and it was order of operations stuff.  You know, in math.  Like you do division before addition and that kind of stuff.  Well, these problems were HUGE.  Gigantic long strings with parentheses inside parentheses and all kinds of crazy stuff.  At first I was like wow she must be super smart.  Then I find out she doesn't even know how to divide and that she's just been walked through problems a million times and now has no idea.  She was just given wayyyy too difficult of problems.  Anyway, so I couldn't just take that lying down and I had to at least teach her how to divide.  We started out by drawing balls and circling them in groups and then counting the groups.  That seemed to take and then we could work on doing it with just numbers.  However, she was the only one doing homework while all the other kids were playing, so it was a losing battle.  So she got to go play and math would have to wait I guess.