We're having fun regrouping over here. Alex came home with his first two-digit subtraction paper on Monday night, and when I got home from work, Laura demanded, "Chris, you have to help him with this, he got it all wrong and I don't know how to explain it to him!"

I looked at it, and it did take me a little while to figure it out, but when I got it, BAM, it was almost fun (almost). When Alex first handed the paper to me, it had answers on it like 32 - 28 = 34. So I'm looking at Alex and, taking a step back for a moment, trying to just theoretically explain how it is that when you have 32 of something, and you take away 28 of it, how you can actually end up with 2 more than you started with. That's when he squints his eyes, cocks his head to the side, his hair stands on end (truly), and he says something that sounds like a combination of "What?" and "Huh?" I knew then that we were in for a big night.

So then I figure we better just go at this mechanically, and apply the regrouping, which is not what we called it when I was a kid (right?), but which I had to figure out. The first thing that threw me off was that in showing how he got to his answer, his work had a vertical line down the middle between the numbers. For some reason this really alarmed me.

But then I noticed that the only problems he seemed to need to "regroup" were the ones where the top, right digit (I know academic types call it the "1's") were lower than the bottom right digits. Ok, so regrouping has something to do with........That.

And then, suddenly, it hit me. I was transported back to my 2nd grade math class at Kindle School in Pitman. I'm at my desk, doing math (by myself! Calculator be damned!), my teacher Mrs. Morgan is looking particularly Teacherish and making teacher noises, and I'm putting slashes through numbers, taking away one's on top, putting one's in front of 3's, all sorts of cool stuff. Some kid's throwing a spitball at me too.

But the point is, I got it. So, for the rest of the evening, I tried to impart to Alex this grain of knowledge, this wisdom, this pearl from the language of the universe that is mathematics.

I'm not sure it's worked. Yet.

But, at least for now, rest assured, someone gets it.

I just hope I don't have to re-learn 3-digit subtraction. Texas Instruments, anyone???