the more I seem to forget...

I did my first round of tutoring last night. I'm working with three kids in a family of four(!) one night a week, basically helping them with their homework. It went fairly well, and I think will go better in the future now that I know the kids a little bit, and especially know what distracts them and what motivates them.

I did have two mortifying moments, though. One was that I had to give the two oldest their French spelling words. I haven't learned any French since about 9th grade. The pronunciations are totally different from English and German, and so the kids were constantly correcting me. That's a great way to impress!

The other was while doing math with the oldest (5th grade), when I completely mentally blanked on how to convert fractions into decimals. It's easy when the denomenator is divisible by 5 (thus easily made into 100), but what about 3/8? To make it worse, her Dad was in the room listening in at the exact moment I blanked. I covered nicely, though, by saying "Let's do these easier ones first to get our brains warmed up." And by the end, I remembered - divide the numerator by the denomenator. Thank god.

Math was never really my thing.