Columnist Susan Snyder: Math is as easy as 1,2,3

Friday, Sept. 8, 2000 | 10:02 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

They are three words that strike fear into the heart of nearly every parent.

Relax. "This is the police," are four words.

We're talking about "middle school math."

Now run for your lives! Fractions, decimals, long division, algebra -- they are the monsters that make parents afraid to ask, "Have any homework?"

Fear not, says Lisa Wilson, a Helen Cannon Middle School math teacher. Math is just a game, she says. And parents who want to learn to play it can attend her class Saturday, called "Middle School Math for Moms and Dads."

The session, hosted by Henderson's Parks and Recreation Department, is from 1:30-3 p.m. at the Silver Springs Recreation Center. It costs $20.

"Math is a game, and if you approach it that way it's not as hard as people think," Wilson said.

Kurt Williams, Henderson's recreation coordinator, hopes to play. He wants to avoid another hairy confrontation like the one he had last year with his son's homework on decimals.

The kid was supposed to write down the names of the places to the left and right of the decimal point. The left side was easy, Williams said.

"But I must have sat there for 45 minutes trying to remember what's on the right side of the decimal," he said. "I finally called his grandfather who said it was tenths, hundreths, thousandths and ten-thousandths."

Williams says his son is a seventh grader, which means he -- and we're talking Dad, here -- faces algebra homework next year.

"Oh, here we go," the bewildered father said.

Wilson hopes to curb such fears. A lot of adults remember their own middle school days as the ones where math moved beyond addition, subtraction and multiplication problems to theorems and equations without numbers.

Most people carry that anxiety into adulthood and with trepidation face their offspring's requests for help, she said.

"Those anxieties follow them, and they pass them along to their own kids," Wilson said. "Ultimately, the workshop is to help the child. Helping the parent is just one step along the way."

Wilson will try to tailor the workshop to fit the needs of those who show up.

One of the worst things about middle school math homework is the grave possibility that kids will figure out that another of their long-held suspicions is correct.

It ranks right up there with, "If that Santa Claus is the real one how come he's wearing brown shoes?"

The fact that Mom and Dad cannot remember the first thing about algebra and still function well enough to pay for cable invariably invites the question, "If you don't use this in real life, how come I have to learn it?"

Aha! Wilson has an answer for that.

"What we're really teaching kids to do is be problem solvers," she said. "You solve problems by asking yourself what do I know, and what do I need to figure out?"

Williams dreads what he eventually must figure out. Algebra begets geometry, which begets even worse.

"When he gets to trigonometry and calculus," Williams said, "forget it."