Potty Training and Multiplication

No, those two things aren't directly related, except in time.

My youngest daughter is potty training... finally! She's 3 1/2 and we've tried a couple times before. Each time before, there was a great deal of resistance and we buckled in to it. This time, there was less resistance (although still some) and we did a much better job of encouraging and not giving in. So today will be day 3 without diapers in the day time. Yesterday evening she did both #1 and #2 in the toilet... I was so proud :-D She goes to the bathroom about 25 or 30 times a day. I think that's just so she makes absolutely sure that she will not wet her panties. She's very diligent about it. Of course, she's still wearing diapers to bed. That probably won't change for a while either. Today I'm going to be home to help Melanie again with the potty training, but tomorrow and the two days after that I will be teaching a course. I hope that Melanie will be able to keep up the discipline for Verity.

My son, Justice, is starting to do multiplication of two-digit numbers (like 24 x 83). He seems to understand the procedure well, but is extremely frustrated by how long it takes him. I sat down with him yesterday for a few minutes near the end of the afternoon. He was in tears because his math worksheet was taking him so long. I discovered that even for very simple multiplication he still does the addition in his head (e.g. 3 x 2 = 2 + 2 + 2) and so of course, doing something like 9 x 7 is incredibly painful and slow. Well, I felt terrible. I thought for sure he new these "times tables" much better than that because he is doing so well in his math comprehension - doing more advanced things than just simple single-digit multiplication. I decided to get him to stop his current lesson and we sat for 10 minutes doing verbal times tables. I would give him five and he would give me five. The way I did it was to give him one, say 4 x 6. He would calculate it out. Then I would reverse it 6 x 4... and he would sometimes remember it was the same results, sometimes he would re-calculate it. Then I would re-reverse it, 4 x 6. And then usually he would get it by memory. I'd like to do this with him a whole bunch of times over the next while. We also did a bit of prime factors stuff (e.g 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 for the 4 x 6 question). Justice really enjoyed doing this. Then he went off to study Chinese where he is doing an excellent job. And I went off and made up over 5000 random single digit times tables questions on 40 worksheets!!! He actually seems excited about doing them. We'll see how long that lasts...

Now it turns out that those two things, potty training and multiplication are related. They are both about capacity. Last night my family went to our friends house. Melanie and I are studying Ruhi Book Seven. This is a book about becoming a tutor or facilitator for other books in the Ruhi Training Institute series. One of the questions is about human capacity and do we know others' capacity, do we know our own capacity. On the face of it, this might seem a simple question, but I admit to being mightily confused about it. The two examples with my children above are at least partly about me as a parent discerning the current capacity of my two children. Do we use this discernment in many aspects of our life. We hear people say "he's not living up to his potential". Or we hear people tell us "you have so much talent". Both of these statements are about the difference between where we are and where we might be. Our unused capacity. Can we really do this? Is it accurate? Is it just?