Confession

I am not smart enough to be homeschooling my children.  It's true.  I'm not looking for affirmation, compliments or advice.  I've accepted it, for the most part.

Today I had to call Steve and ask him how I was suppose to teach Zach to solve a math problem (he's only in kindergarten; we're not even to the hard stuff yet).  I was, and still am, stumped.

Zach has been doing really well with addition and subtraction.  He has been solving problems by getting a number to 10; for instance 6+7 becomes (6+4)+3.  He is understanding the concepts and moving quickly through the book.  We have slowly gotten to more difficult problems and today we were presented with this:  

It looks like the book wants him to start with 10, take away 6 and then add it to the remainder (in this case, 1) to get 5; it would look like 10-6+1=5.  So that's how I was teaching him, but of course he is getting confused by the fact that we are doing subtraction and then addition to get the answer.  By the time we get to this problem I start to doubt myself and call Steve:

We proceed to have a discussion about which makes more sense: to do 10-9+8 or 18-8-1.  And then I think, "THIS IS KINDERGARTEN MATH!!!!  I SHOULDN'T ALREADY BE HAVING THIS TROUBLE!"  I arrive at the brilliant conclusion that we will skip math today and I will write a blog about it instead.