I Solve a Math Problem

Mister is good at math. I can still check his math homework, so I feel pretty good about that. But some math problems are more challenging than others.

Yesterday, Mister had weekend math homework and he did it Sunday morning. When he finished it, I checked it and returned it to Mister. Mister placed it on an end table. And there it sat all day. When I was getting Mister and Lamb ready to go back to their mom's house last night, Mister scrambled for his homework. It wasn't by other school material I set by the door. Mister went back looking for it while Lamb and I waited with our shoes and jacket on.

Mister found his homework. Unfortunately, it was welded solid to the table top. I can only guess that Mister must have spilled something sticky on the table in the morning. Perhaps some strawberries he ate there. Maybe some juice. Hard to say.

Hard to remove, actually.

So I popped off my shoes, with Lamb following to see the source of the commotion and anguish from Mister over the state of his homework.

Pulling up on the paper I could see that a good 4" x 6" part of the paper was stuck solid. I pulled and some paper started to come off from the back. So already I had some very thin spot with the ink barely surviving in a translucent segment of near-paper. Anguish levels went up.

But not mine. I worked the problem. With a spatula. In retrospect perhaps a damp towel applied gently could have loosened the paper. But we had to get moving to get two children ready for bed. So I scraped up the homework, leaving strips of paper stuck to the table surface and only a couple small holes in the paper. But the homework was free and still retained that rectangular paper shape. Luckily, this was a one-sided homework assignment. The anguish level was no longer rising but the homework was looking shabby.

So it was off to the table. I slapped the paper down with the blank side up, grabbed a blank sheet of paper, cut a patch to cover the thin spot, and taped it in place. After flipping it over, I told Mister to fill in the gaps of his answers on the blank spots formed by the paper patch.

Lamb thought this was a hoot. While Mister and I worked at the table, Lamb started going after the paper remnants on the table with the spatula. Hey? Dad was doing it! This was an opportunity to do something ordinarily verboten, without a doubt. Meanwhile, Mister was able to do this very quickly and I then applied tape across the holes in the front.

This was good. Since Mister answered questions that had not been covered in class about the number of sides and vertices on 3-D polygons, I really hated to lose this homework. Mister used a dictionary and Google to get those answers, after I prodded him that not having been taught the answers in class should be no obstacle in this day and age. Even my dial-up service could handle this!

So I can still solve fifth grade math problems.