I can’t blame him. He spent one long evening trying to explain and solve her math problems. Nasa was all over the place and tried to wiggle her way out of homework by being funny and entertaining, but Baaskaa never gave up or lost his patience. Steadily and firmly he brought her attention back to her notebook and no matter how many times she came to a wrong conclusion, he went back to the beginning, until she got it right.
They started her homework after we ate dinner. By 11:30pm they successfully had all math problems solved.
I learned from watching; now we start before dinner.☺
Reading and writing went smoothly and math became easier with time. I developed a system of demonstrating addition by using sugar cubes and I bought a colorful counting book for preschoolers, which visualized numbers through images of fruit. When I ripped the book apart to hang the single pages on the wall, Nasa got incredible excited. I think this was the most excited I have ever seen her; something was added to the house that was just for her.
Things were groovy and moved along. And then the teacher introduced her to subtraction.
Nasa couldn’t comprehend why you would take something away, in theory, when it was obviously physically still there. We had x amount of sugar cubes and I pretended I would take them away, when they clearly were in my hand. It just didn’t make sense to her.
And I found no way of explaining it. These are the moments when it really becomes frustrating that we don’t have a common language. But it wasn’t just a language issue, Baaskaa tried too (half heartedly, I admit), and couldn’t explain it to her either. Pointing a camera at her wasn’t really helping the cause. At some point I had to put the film maker in me on the back burner and asked Blake to stop shooting, in the hope that it would make her feel less pressured. But it was too late, by now I had lost my patience and Nasa was muttering complains while shooting the sugar cubes from one end of the table to the other.
I felt awful and helpless. There was something about subtraction, that she couldn’t comprehend and I couldn’t figure out how to break that barrier. What do you do in a situation like that?
The next morning I apologized to the teacher for not having completed the homework (yes, I gave up!) and asked her to explain subtraction again.
That evening Nasa and I started all over again, without camera. Sadly it turned into a repetition of the previous evening. Except that this time no one dared to enter the kitchen anymore.
What do you do, if you can’t explain something as simple as 5 – 3 = 2?
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