Math Problems That Stand a Chance of Motivating My Kid

Cinna, Fred Weasley, Primrose Everdeen, and Rue are depending on you! Finish the story problems in a timely manner, with minimal fussing, and you can avert their tragic deaths. Go!

1. The arena has a 5-foot-wide river of flesh-eating acid, but if you make it to the end, you know you will find a big bowl of lamb stew. You are literally, and by literally, I mean literally, starving. If the area of the river is 1,036 square feet, how many feet must you travel to get to the stew?
2. Lawrence had 146 cherries. He used them to bake 5 pies. Assuming he used the same number of cherries for each pie, how many will each pie have? He will give any remaining cherries to his hungry pet dove, Neville. How many cherries will Neville get?
3. The parking lot at the Bruno Mars concert has 5 identical rows of parking spaces. If there are a total of 615 spaces, how many rows are there?
4. Cam baked Lily's class of 25 students each one gluten-free, anise macaron. If each batch yields 5 cookies, how many batches did Cam bake?
5. Students worked in teams to write letters of complaint to the mainstream media. The team most concerned with ablism wrote 3 letters. The team most concerned with adultism wrote 8 times as many. How many letters did the team most concerned with adultism write?
6. The Hunger Games begin at 8:30, and the first tribute dies at 10:15. How many minutes passed between the games beginning and the first tribute dying?
7. If Cato starts running from Thresh at 11:15, and runs for 3 hours, 20 minutes before Thresh slaughters him, what time does Cato die?
8. The arena has a path that looks safe, but burns up the children's feet on contact. Three tributes are mutilated before the other 15 figure out they should avoid it. How many children died before any of this happened? If it one of the injured takes six hours to die, one 8 hours and 20 minutes, and one 13 hours, what is the mean amount of time between injury and death? 
9. Bill Weasley will require a total of 11 surgeries to recover from his werewolf attack. The surgeries must be spaced three weeks apart. How many weeks until Bill does not need any more medical intervention?
10. French film director Alice Guy-Blaché donated 8 boxes of film to a collective of struggling young feminist directors. 5 boxes contained 12 reels each. The rest contained 24 reels each. How many reels did Alice Guy-Blaché donate in all?
11. Katniss must convince 15 members of President Snow's cabinet that she is madly in love with Peeta. She has already convinced 10. What percentage of cabinet members remain unconvinced?
12. 2 vats of poisoned gas cost the game makers the same. If one vat contains 900 mL and the other contains 1L, which is the better buy?
13. Sylvia has received an $18,000 advance on her novel. It is due in 52 weeks and will take her 1,267 hours to complete. How many hours a week must she work on her novel in order to meet her deadline? She has already spent her advance.
14. Professor Umbridge makes Harry stay after school and carve words into his own hand for three hours every afternoon. He spends a total of 28 hours carving up his hand. How many days did this take? 

*Bonus question: This test contains at least one major literary inconsistency. Can you guess what it is? Do you see more than one?

My Imaginary Business Meeting With Beyonce's Dad and Sister

For a variety of reasons, I'm down today. Not very down, just mid-range down. You know what helps cheer me up when I'm slightly to moderately blue? My imaginary business meeting with Beyonce's dad and sister.

I was surprised when I heard they wanted to meet with me, but not overly so, because I have a reputation for being an extremely successful, competent, and pragmatic business person. It's worth their while to work with me – they wouldn't bother otherwise. What kind of business am I in, and why do Beyonce's dad and sister want to collaborate with me? I don't know, and making something up would bring me no comfort. So just sit back and relax, and don't ask too many questions.

When they arrive at my office, they are all business. Especially Solange. No chit chat. They don't accept coffee, tea, or even water. But they aren't hostile, either. They just don't mix business with pleasure. This is business, and they have places to go and people to see. They don't have all day.

We aren't friends, just associates. Beyonce might compliment your shoes or feign an interest in your recent vacation, but not Solange. What you see is what you get with Solange. She never lies, not with her words or her manner. She's here to hammer this thing out. That's all. She is sincere to her very core. The way she sees it, she doesn't really care if your kids have started school yet, so why would she ask? If she likes your shoes, she'll go home and have a serious discussion with her personal shopper to find out why she didn't get to them first. Not a tantrum, though. She just wants to find out exactly what happened. 

Solange is beautiful, in a cold, distant sort of way. Her natural hair looks even more incredible in person than it does in pictures. She isn't overdressed, but her style is impeccable. Tailored, vintage-looking pants and a button down shirt that makes a bold statement, but doesn't convey the desperation for attention that flashy clothes so often do. That outfit is so entirely suited to her in every way, she could have been born in it. Her makeup is perfect. 

Mr. Knowles is no pushover, but he's a little more like Beyonce than Solange. He smiles, shakes my hand, and starts to make small talk. Solange shoots him a look that lasts only a nanosecond, but lets him know this isn't what we're here for. Not that he's a whipped-dog type, or an incompetent fool who is dependent upon his daughter's skills. He most certainly is not. But you have to understand that Solange is extremely powerful. True, he's her dad and has known her since she was born, but her authoritative presence is truly staggering, something you couldn't get used to no matter how long you were around it. You've never encountered anything like it. Nobody's cowering, but nobody's contradicting her, either.

I hold my own, knowing they would never have approached me if I didn't have all their respect. We get down to business.

I write an estimate down on a piece of paper and slide it across the table toward them. Solange takes it, and tilts it so Mr. Knowles can see it, too. The sides of her mouth start to curl up, because despite herself, this is what she lives for. She loves to negotiate, and can barely contain her glee. But she does, because she has the discipline of a prima ballerina. She writes down a counteroffer and slides it back to me.

I turn over the paper over and almost laugh out loud at the lowball offer. What if I were to accept it? Solange and Mr. Knowles would probably call the whole thing off then and there, because they do not suffer fools. We're just warming up. They aren't going to sell themselves short, but I'm confident they won't try to cheat me in any way. It's not that they don't care about money – they do. Very much so. But for them, the game is almost as appealing as the prize. It's not a real competition unless everyone plays fair. They couldn't look at themselves in the mirror unless they knew they'd won fair and square. I'm not worried. I know we'll all walk away satisfied.

After exactly an hour of productive negotiating, we come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Solange finally allows herself to crack a smile when she shakes my hand, but she still doesn't get too friendly. After all, I'm a business associate. This isn't the last time she'll be working with me.

The Last Stone on Your Grave

The way I remember it, I was three years old and playing in my back yard. I chatted with my next door neighbor, a dark-haired man of maybe 20. That was all.

The way my parents remember it, they heard me outside talking to someone, so when I came in they asked me who it was.

"My friend Ralph," I said casually.

They say Ralph was 90 years old and had died a few days earlier.

Do I believe in ghosts? It makes no difference. Either they exist, or they don't. My belief doesn't make them real, and my lack thereof doesn't make them false. I do not fear ghosts, and I am puzzled when others do. For most of my life I labored under the assumption that they were either proof of life after death, or a form of death denial invented by people expressly to comfort ourselves. So what's to be afraid of?

"There is no record of a ghost ever hurting a person," I have occasionally reasoned, attempting to comfort a frightened child. You're right to snort. It works as well as it sounds like it would. Meaning, don't bother. At times, I have resorted to saying that there is no such thing as a ghost, which I always swore I never would, because how should I know? Of course, that doesn't work either. Expressing a fear of ghosts is a safer way of expressing fear of death. So what I'm really saying is, there is no record of death ever hurting a person, and there is no such thing as death. Even the youngest child knows this to be utter nonsense. I have concluded that there is little to nothing you can do to sooth someone's fear of dying. Whether you are an adult or a child makes no difference at all, because death turns us all into lost, ageless souls. All you can do is try not to make it worse.

Perhaps it speaks to my lack of imagination that the possibility of a ghost without consciousness only recently occurred to me. Seeing Ralph, whether it was real or imagined, offers no evidence at all that he hadn't been completely obliterated. Even if there is life after death, and believe me, I'm open to the possibility, the versions of us that lived on earth will not last forever. With him went his memories, and at his age, there were probably people in those memories nobody remembered but him. They died their final death on the day he left the earth, only this time around it went completely unnoticed.

For the last few years of his life, my grandpa suffered from increasingly severe dementia. It wasn't the backward march of Alzheimer's, regressing him to a younger man, then a teenager, then a child. He just gradually seemed to forget everyone and everything he had ever known. However, before that happened, aware that he was a very old man coming to the end of his life, he would repeat the same few memories more and more frequently.

My grandpa was born in 1915, so his birthday was not on a holiday weekend until Veteran's Day was first observed as Armistice Day in 1918, just as he was turning three. He remembered a big parade, and a man who carried him on his shoulders and pointed to the gutter.

"The Kaiser's down there!" he told the toddler version of my whip smart grandfather, who understood that it was not true.

For as long as he had an ounce of lucidity, he told that story whenever I saw him. Like most men his age, he later became a WWII Veteran himself. Although he was not one for war stories, there was one that haunted him more and more.

My grandfather and his unit were approached by a terrified German soldier. He was only a boy, and he came to them with his hands up, shouting an "I surrender!" that he himself probably did not understand. He hoped the American soldiers would, and they did. But one of them shot him anyway.

"He shot him!" my grandfather would say, his horror, shock and disgust as evident at the age of 90 as it must have been 65 years earlier. "He just....shot him."

The German boy seemed to be knocking, then banging, on the door of my grandpa's mind, demanding to be remembered.

Last week, my grandpa died. Who did he take with him? He was the last surviving member of his family of origin. His little sister had died a year before, making me grateful for his lack of memory and comprehension for the first and only time. Thank God for small mercies. Not that he believed in God, or, for that matter, that I do.

She'd had her own husband, children and grandchildren, and presumably a community full of various other players. So no worries there. Aunt Jackie will live on in memory for years to come. I myself remember her as a lovely, gentle woman, the perfect foil for her gruff husband. Those who knew her better would be able to provide you with a more nuanced picture.

But what of his older sister, the brilliant woman with the movie star looks who had no children and died young? Well, she wasn't that young, and it wasn't that long ago. Her nieces and nephews probably remember her, along with a smattering of other people I cannot guess at.

His parents lived long lives, so again they must be remembered at least by their grandchildren.

His grandparents, though. As much as he felt and feels like my "real" grandfather, the truth is he was my step-grandfather. Do I call his parents my great-grandparent, or his grandparents my great-great grandparents? Yes and no. I didn't know them and don't share their heritage, but to the extent that my grandpa was a part of me, they must be, too. They tried to force their fanatical religious beliefs onto my grandpa and his sisters, until they were informed by his parents that they were going to drive their grandchildren away if they didn't lay off. Did they die with him on Friday?

The man who carried him on his shoulders on the first Veterans Day? The woman who did the cooking for his frat house? The uncle who was a barrel of fun when he was young, but miserable when he became old and religious? He seemed to have been a strong influence on my grandpa's passionate Atheism. The German soldier? Maybe he, who never had the chance to live a long, full life, was about to die too, and he wasn't going down without a fight this time. All of these people might have left the world forever with my grandfather. Or none of them. Certainly there are a number of other potential candidates that I know nothing of. Perhaps it shouldn't bother me, but it does.

I will, of course, never know who who puts the final nail in my coffin, although I believe, with the smug arrogance of someone who is alive, relatively young, and doesn't really believe she's going to die, that it will be someone I haven't met yet. Still, I can't help but wonder who will die with me.

My best guess is Ralph, someone I met (or didn't meet?) when he was very old and I was very young. I wish I knew more about him, but I know nothing. It's such an intimate task for the universe to assign to a virtual stranger, and I'm sorry that I believe myself to be the one who is going to do it. But I think I'll be taking Ralph with me when I go, and I think it will be for good.

Shameless Bragging

Don't be afraid to check out this short film my daughter Simone made and narrated. It's about the struggle cats have waged all over the world to break free of gender stereotypes.

http://vimeo.com/72517937

Stolen

Often, while reading a book that inspires conflicting feelings, I'll scurry off to Goodreads or (no, let's face it, and) Amazon, in addition to whatever other random reviews and blog posts I can find, to get an idea of other readers' perspectives. Almost as often, I will come away more disturbed than I was in the first place. Though there is no getting around the fact that I may take works of fiction a wee bit more personally than most, I've learned that if I have mixed feelings, other readers have also reacted strongly.

This is what happened as I read Lucy Christopher's Stolen. The more I read, the more suspicious I grew - where was this going, and were other people as uncomfortable with it as I was? In a word, no. Most readers seem to love it. This bothers me.

One might point out that I am not in the book's YA demographic, that perhaps I have no business at all reading such a book and judging it by adult standards. After all, how old is your average YA reader? 10? 12? Perhaps I'm out of touch, but the way I remember it, by high school you wouldn't be caught dead reading such a book. Would I watch Sesame Street and scoff at the rather basic lessons it teaches, smug in my ability to count to numbers so high the show does not even acknowledge their existence?

Nevertheless, while I'm not entirely clear on the author's intentions, I know for certain that many readers have fallen in love with Ty, Stolen's fictional kidnapper. Why? Because he's not like other kidnappers. He's hot. Call me a humorless, man-hating feminist, but I think a man who spots a ten-year-old girl in the park, spends the next six years alternately stalking her and building a desolate fortress in a harsh environment with the express intention of her having no chance of surviving an escape attempt, and finally drugging and abducting the object of his...um...affection, is a bad guy. Does it make me feel better about such a man if his victim's fears that he just might be a rapist hurt his feelings? Not really. In addition to their crushes on Ty, many of these readers react to his victim, Gemma, with a similar brand of envious disdain that inspired Chris Brown Can Beat Me tweets.

Initially, Gemma fights tooth and nail, and Ty ultimately tells her that if she wants to leave "I won't stop you. I'll only save you when you get lost." Which is exactly what happens. I harkened back to the first time I saw Disney's Beauty and the Beast as a teenager, and how incensed I was when, terrified by the Beast's behavior, Belle ran frantically from the castle and encountered a pack of wolves. The beast ran after her and saved her life, but it came at a cost. He suffered a thorn in his paw, which Belle helped him remove. As well she should have, because after all, his injury was all her fault.

I Don't Like Guns

Gun control. I'm for it, pretty much. I believe in background checks and waiting periods. I see no reason for anyone to own a weapon that will cause extraordinary damage - am I talking about automatic or semi-automatic weapons here? Maybe. That's what keeps me from being more passionate about the issue. I don't understand gun language, and haven't taken the time to educate myself about it, because guns are boring.

It doesn't matter how boring I think they are - a gun could, at any moment, wander into my life and shake things up in a way that will leave me begging for boring. I don't get the fascination some people seem to have with them. But they do. Especially children. Especially - I'll just say it - boys.

Before I had children, I worked with them. I babysat, worked in daycares and taught preschool. Every daycare and preschool where I worked had a "no gun play" rule.

I could appreciate the spirit of the rule. Kids need to be taught that violence is wrong, and they need to know that guns are dangerous and something to be feared. I was fine with rules against toy guns (aside from squirt guns - I believed, then and now, that brightly colored water guns do not count as guns). However, after endless, futile attempts to squelch games involving little boys making legos, blocks, sandwiches, and their thumb and index fingers into imaginary guns, I grew wary of the no gun play rule. Many boys were drawn to guns, and I started to believe that whatever was going on, it was a phase they needed to work though. Perhaps halting their play was even preventing them from coming out on the other side of whatever this obsession was about. It seemed like a useless waste of energy. "They're playing! God!" I would think. I swore that if I ever had a son, I would relax. I wouldn't give him toy guns, but I wouldn't stop him from pretending he had one.

Eventually, I did have a son. When he was still a baby, I continued to believe that hysteria over gun play was silly and pointless. I'd teach my son that violence was wrong and guns were dangerous, but if, like so many other boys, he was fascinated by them, I wouldn't censor his play. But a funny thing happened on my way to being the cool mom who didn't fly into hysterics over harmless playing.

As he grew, it became obvious that my boy was sweet, kind and sensitive. Not quite or shy - he's always been active, even hyperactive, but never a hint of aggression. All the more reason not to worry, I thought. As my faith in him as a non-violent person grew, I believed that he could probably stage a pretend shoot-out with other children without it weakening the message I wanted him to understand. Violence is bad, weapons are dangerous, and pretending is fine. He has rarely been exposed to any violence, and when he encounters aggression in other people he is confused and hurt.

I was relieved as he got older and guns never came up. "Got older" is probably laughable - he's still not even six. He is an unformed person, of course. I'll learn more about him over time. But he was older than the little boys who had gotten me thinking about this in the first place had been, and I still wasn't sure he knew what a gun was. I thought I was refusing to be smug and take credit for this - I wasn't going to brag about how my strictness about media was responsible for his lack of interest in guns and violence. The truth is, as much as I'd like to be a die-hard no screen time type, I'm not. We watch TV and movies. Rarely are guns involved. Not because we're disciplined, but because, as a group, my family does not find them to be a part of an interesting narrative. Again, they are boring. I thought I was being humble, chalking it up to lack of interest on his part rather than lack of exposure. Perhaps, though, it was simply more important to me to believe in my son's inherent purity and goodness than my own morally superior parenting.

Lately, he and a friend have started playing guns. I could blame the friend, and often do. He's the one who comes to me and says "We're playing water guns, but with no water!" M still doesn't play guns without this particular friend. But he had begun making occasional gun noises a few months before his buddy showed up with his lust for firearms. If he isn't obsessed, he isn't indifferent either.

Here I am, older and more uptight. Wiser? It's debatable.  If my position on children and imaginary guns is evolving, the change is not yet complete. My thoughts and opinions on them are abstract and very removed, and I fervently hope that I never have an experience that leads me to be any more of an authority on the subject than I am right now. I had a non-violent, pacifist upbringing that taught me nothing about guns except to stay away from them. My in-laws, while not as firmly anti-gun as my own parents, are nothing if not eminently sensible. They have them - family heirlooms, trotted out once in a blue-moon for recreational target shooting - but I've never seen them and they would certainly never draw their grandchildren's attention to them. They're locked away somewhere, far away from the bullets.

Here I am, and the sound of my son playing guns provokes a visceral reaction in me in a way little boys who weren't mine never did. It makes my skin crawl.

Before putting a stop to it, I stop and ask myself if I really have a legitimate problem with this, or if it's something that just bugs me. Do I think this is normalizing violence in his mind, or is the sound of an imaginary gun shot simply a dagger (bullet?) in my heart, a reminder that my baby growing up and slowly losing his sweet innocence is inevitable? I don't know. I'm reluctant to make any rules about it until I can decide what I believe, why I believe it, and how I am going to proceed. If I think playing with imaginary guns will normalize violence for him, it's important that I stop him. If I just don't want my baby to grow up, it's equally as important that I don't. As it is, if I tried to make a daycare-like "no gun play" rule in my house, I would enforce it sporadically and inconsistently, depending upon my mood. Not exactly desirable parenting.

What is it about kids? It seems like they have a radar for when I've decided "I'm not crazy about what he's doing right now, but I'm going to let it slide." It causes them to ask me if what they're doing is okay. Kid, could you show me just a little bit of mercy? If not, perhaps you're the type who shouldn't be playing with guns. Is it okay? I just don't know anymore. I have strong feelings about it, but no clear thoughts.

I think of Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation.

"Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." 

Gun noises coming out of my son's mouth hit me like the sound of him unlearning all that I have tried to teach him about charity, mercy and patience. I can't stand it. Should I try to anyway? Because he's playing. God! 

I have no clue. 

Matthew Shepard, I Wish I'd Never Heard of You

Yesterday, this beautiful video was making the rounds on Facebook.  It's really lovely, and it makes its point clearly.  Everyone in the video died before they had the chance to accomplish all that they could have.  We are all poorer because they didn't get the chance.  Towards the end, we see the headline "Matthew Shepard, 36, Leads Anti-Bullying Coalition."

Matthew Shepard was born on December 1, 1976, and until October 12, 1998 was one day younger than me.  But since that day, the gap has been widening, and now he is almost 15 years younger.  Yes, I know, the bell tolls for thee. The age-enhanced photo showed him looking exactly as he did when he was alive, only unmistakably 36 instead of 21.

I was as touched by the video as anyone, but one thing kept nagging at me.  Unlike everyone else featured, who Matthew Shepard was in life is not common knowledge.  Even Anne Frank, who died younger than he did, got a chance to tell us who she was.  Matthew Shepard is famous because of the way he died.  Unlike most murder victims, we at least remember his name instead of his murderers'.  Even so, it's highly unlikely that we would know his name if he had lived.  Maybe he has taught us more about bullying and hate crimes than he could have otherwise, but does that make his early, horrific death worth it?  Hell no.

No doubt Matthew Shepard would have done something with his life, but we have no reason to believe that bullying would have been his pet issue.  A quick internet search tells me that he was personable, passionate about equality, that he had a love of foreign languages and cared about the environment.  Yes, the video does address that he was a political science major.  But we don't know what kind of man he would have become, and he can't tell us.  All we can say for sure is that Matthew Shepard should be 36.

He and I would probably have never crossed paths, but I still can't shake the feeling that he should be here with me, steadily careening toward middle-age. It's terrifying, but only if you don't compare it to being tied to a fence and beaten to death by two thugs.  Sure, if that happens you get to stay 21.  But not in a good way.  If he were here, we wouldn't need to project an identity that might have nothing to do with who he would have become onto him.  He probably wouldn't have reached so many people, but anyone he did get to meet would get to know a real human instead of a mythical symbol.

"Matthew Shepard, 36, Leads Anti-Bullying Coalition."  It has a nice ring to it, but "Man-You've-Never-Heard-of-Because-He-Wasn't-Tortured-to-Death-in-1998, 36, Lives Some Sort of Life Somewhere" sounds even better.  He didn't need to get famous or lead a revolution.  Leading an anti-bullying coalition would be great, but leading an ordinary life would have been good enough.     You could be average.  Even, God forbid, mediocre.  I'd love you anyway, struggling, imperfect soul to struggling, imperfect soul.  Matthew Shepard, I wish you were here, even though if you were I wouldn't know it.