Math Rules

My baby girl lost the math contest, they placed 4th as a team. She announced it at the clinic while I was speaking to a mother who’s a “regular” at the clinic. This mother takes her kid for a monthly penicillin shot.

It’s for rheumatic heart disease. The shot is  soooo damn painful. But kids like them don’t cry anymore, we have successfully rationalized the need for the pain...suck it up or... never play forever,  or  die young ,or, you won’t live long enough to finish your favourite Korean telenovela...lol

Anyway, that is not the story.


This mother is also a mother of a math contestant at their place...it’s the same contest my baby girl took earlier today...only it’s a different area of schools. I guess it’s a simultaneous schools' activity.

Her child got 15 over 50 then achieved 5th place with the teammates. She has a couple of things to say about why her kid lost.

1. The child who got 36 over 50 had leakage.( Lol. But 36 is not the score of a genius...50 is...and  a better sign of leakage too. I honestly think that winning kid is smart...but not smarter than the one who won in our area. I didn’t bring it up though, it might dampen her spirit.)

2. The winner has professors for parents.(What does that mean? ...my baby girl lost while her parents are doctors!??So if the parents work as fisherman or farmer...they would’t stand a chance? Nahhh, I guess she is just condemning us because we're doctors and our baby girl lost...)

3. Some parents sent their kids for math tutorial lessons while, she taught her child math and she never got to finish answering the back portion of the reviewer. (That’s it. The test was so damn hard she couldn’t answer them. And just because she couldn’t answer them doesn’t mean somebody else’s kid can’t answer them also.It's an admission of defeat.)

The funniest of it all, is when I asked her what the grade levels do her kids belongs to. They’re at grade one and two. ( That’s when the questions are the easiest... and she never got to answer the last section of the reviewer...I wonder what the questions were...hmmm)

How about me ...What do i think, why my baby girl lost...Well,I think the winners were really smart and i think, we should have polished English also...and while I was trying to sharpen the multiplication table... the competition was taking up algebra lessons...we're light years away to winning...lol...(but, anak, let’s try again next year...this time, mommy promises to teach you advance algebra and statistics and of course, advance bussiness english.)

Sample reviewer questions for grade three:
1.  My ones digit is 2 more than my tens digit and my hundreds is 1 less than my tens. The sum of my digits is 10. Who am I?
2. In 856= 800+50+6= 800+40+N, What is N?
3. Our dining table is 15dm long and 9 dm wide. What is the perimeter?
4. If you skip count by saying 7 on the first skip, then 12, 17, 22, 27, 32,..., what number will you say on the 20th skip?
5. Mother bought 2 ½ dozen eggs. She used 18 for dessert and 4 for omelets. How many eggs remained?

It’s a math contest...the smartest rules.