As much as I love running with Nikita (to the extent that I will often run twice in a day to make sure I can join her), nothing tops doing math together.

School has started. And so has our sitting together with a few pieces of paper and a math book. Right now, her school has her attending math classes two grades higher than her actual grade but what I like most is doing math problems from outside the school curriculum.

I am always amazed and impressed by the difference in which math was taught to us versus how they learn it in the US. Even now, when I see how my nephews learn math in India, I realize that the focus is on the formulaic part – with a lot of tests.

Kids in US seem to be lot more focused on actual application of the math concepts. They are more worried about if the kids can translate a real world problem to the correct mathematical formulation rather than solving the formula itself.

Many of the math problems for my daughter encourage them to approximate or estimate, as an example. In India, we had to come to the exact answer to the nth digit if we hoped to get full marks.

I thrived in the India system. I think I would have struggled in the US system.

In any case, this was last evening – by the pool side, understanding rotational speed and linear speed. (At some point of time we had turned the food cart – see next to the fire chimera – upside down to study the big wheels and the small wheels to check the concepts first hand).

Pure joy!