{"id":878,"date":"2010-11-15T23:34:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T03:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=878"},"modified":"2010-11-15T23:34:53","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T03:34:53","slug":"fractions-oh-poo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=878","title":{"rendered":"Fractions? Oh, Poo."},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you remember fractions?\u00a0 You know, seven eighths, two hundred forty-seven three hundred twenty ninths?\u00a0 A third?\u00a0 Do you remember what a pain in the butt that was?\u00a0 No?\u00a0 Me either.\u00a0 The joy of having kids is that you get to revisit ALL your childhood, not just the good parts.\u00a0 Not that the diapers were such a joy, but at least I could speak with some authority.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s poo.\u201d\u00a0 (I know poo when I see it.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hard to speak with authority when you haven\u2019t done your math homework in 30 years, and what little you remember is all from Tom Lehrer<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t really know poo about math, and I certainly don\u2019t remember poo about simplifying fractions.\u00a0 What I do know is how to talk to everyone in the language they understand. \u00a0For me, helping Number One Son with his homework tonight was a question of finding the point at which his interests, his experience, and his problems intersect. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSon, you\u2019re not going to simplify these fractions.\u00a0 The problem is that they\u2019re all too fat.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to perform Gastric Bypass on these things, and get them as thin as you can!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Suddenly it was fun, plus he got the analogy because he’s seen so damn many ER and medical shows that explaining simplifying fractions as surgery made perfect sense to him. \u00a0But I\u2019m still humming \u201cYou can\u2019t take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at four in the tens place…\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you remember fractions? You know, seven eighths, two hundred forty-seven three hundred twenty ninths? A third? Do you remember what a pain in the butt that was? No? Me either. The joy of having kids is that you get to revisit ALL your childhood, not just the good parts. Not that the diapers were such a joy, but at least I could speak with some authority. \u201cThat\u2019s poo.\u201d (I know poo when I see it.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[61,35,5,40,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}