It does not get much better than this…

Over six hours of out in the mountains on the motorbike with two awesome friends or doing math with Nikita for over four hours. The good news is that it was a virtual tie! The bad news? I have done nothing else today!!
But can I show you how to graph complex trigonometric functions or what? 🙂

Instead of waking up with the sunrise, he chooses to cover his eyes with his paws and continue sleeping.

After 10 days of frustratingly scrambling thru the refrigerator searching for stuff, I finally gave in today and organized the whole dang thing by categories. While not exactly following a Dewey decimal system, the post-its at least spell out the categories. In the process, I managed to come up with an empty shelf too. I was so pleased with myself that I called Nikita to show off my organization powers.

“Do you like how I have organized everything?”
“You know what she will say, right?”
“What?”
“I CAN’T FIND ANYTHING, ANYWHERE”
Somewhat deflated, I asked “You do not know that.”
“I should know, dad”
“How?”
“Because that is what I do to her when she tries to organize my bedroom”.

Oh! Boy!!

I did not even take a picture of the “before” situation to undo everything!!

Every year, the local Bengali community asks me to write something for their annual publication. Usually, I pick something from my blog and then send it to them. This year, they asked me to put together a few blogs and write out a longer piece.

Which I did. With a lot of effort. After finishing it, I waited a day and then did a read over. Corrected a lot of mistakes that I had and changed a few of the constructs.

Then I had a brainwave. Since we have a budding journalist in our house, I sent it to Natasha and asked her if she could edit it for me.

I think she paid me back for all her workbook corrections I did when she was younger! Not only did she make a lot of edits, she put a 10-bullet point note in the beginning – on common mistakes I make that I should avoid. The last one was 5 sentences long in bold and beautiful font!!! And now I know what a “em dash” is!!

That said, she did give it a very polished look. After looking at what she has done to my initial script, I am tempted – a wee bit – to actually write a book about my life journey – provided Natasha agrees to edit it.

I can visualize the title page already…

“History of my Future. First Draft.”
Written by: Rajib Roy
(Liberally) Edited by: Natasha Roy

🙂

Learnt the difference between a professional and an amateur today!

“Dad, you are a nerd”
“Oh! Yeah? I have been called worse. So, there!”
She shook her head and went on to the kitchen to warm her milk.

What earned me that sobriquet this early morning at the breakfast table was the fact I was trying to put a jigsaw puzzle of African countries together. You can be forgiven if you are equally confused about why on God’s green earth would I wake up early in the morning to do jigsaw puzzles.

Well, it happened the other day. Natasha was on her way from Paris to Accra, Ghana to start her fall semester. The flight was half way done, time wise. Nikita had asked me how far had she reached. I started to answer her “She will be roughly above….”. And I never managed to finish that sentence. I actually had very poor understanding of the geographical location of the different countries in Africa. Most other continents, given two countries, I can name – with reasonable accuracy the likely countries she will be flying over. But when it came to Africa, all I could think about was the the big Sahara desert!

Coming to think of it, while I had a vague idea of where Ghana is (I remember Mrs. Bhowmic teaching us about cocoa production n Ghana), I could not name a single country that borders the country my daughter was headed to!! I remember in school we had learnt a lot about the countries in other continents. But do not seem to remember studying a lot about Africa. Of course, it does not help that Africa has way too many countries!!

Curious how many countries I could name in Africa, I started jotting them down. And challenged Nikita to the same. After a lot of effort, I could remember about 35 of them. I thought I would have completely trounced Nikita. She beat me by about 10 countries! And then when we Googled, we learnt that even she had missed 10 countries!!!

If that was bad, try this. She asked me if I could tell locate the various countries are. I got about half a dozen right. And about half a dozen more if you allow “rough vicinity” to be the pass mark. The rest, I had no idea where they were (other than vague North, South, East, West etc.).

That is what triggered that realization that I need to do something about my ridiculous ignorance of the second largest continent of the world. What I did was, unlike most sane people, ordered a jigsaw puzzle of Africa (countries as individual jigsaw pieces) from Amazon. This morning, armed with a cup of coffee and pen and paper, I sat down to study the map.

“You just watch. In 3 months I will master Africa. I will learn about each country, their capital and some cool facts about each country”, I told my incredulous younger daughter.
“Yeah. You might want to do that faster”
“Why?”, I asked.
“They keep having rebellions and split into different countries”, she said as she took her cup of milk out of the microwave.

You know, maybe that is why I never learnt anything about Africa in childhood. They kept changing the count on me 🙂

Normally, when she goes out of town, she stacks up the refrigerator with all sorts of food cooked for the week with sticky notes on each container declaring the contents. Without those sticky notes, I kind of have a reputation for “depth first search”. Which means, I will take the nearest container and eat whatever it has – whether it was meant for me or not – for every single meal, till it finishes. Then I would move to the container behind it.

This time has not been any different. All those delicious dishes she has cooked for Nikita and I are all cleanly stacked and marked with post its inside the refrigerator.

That being said, I have to admit that the salmon this time has been a little drier than usual. Try as I might, it just “wooden” go down well 🙂

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!