Never On Sunday

Caught my kids cheating on their homework yesterday. Five kids got the same wrong answer. That’s only to be expected now and again when they work together, and I’m perfectly happy that they should work together, but this was a stupid wrong answer, the kind of wrong answer that kids working together and not merely copying answers would never produce. I am morally certain that someone accidentally pushed an extra button on his calculator, typing in “189” when he meant “18,” got the wrong answer, and all his study buddies copied the answer without a second thought.

So I had to give them The Lecture on Copying. I’m sure you’ve heard it once or twice yourself, so I won’t repeat it here. I bring it up because I was able to make a bit of educational hay out of it by observing that they’d learned about estimation the previous semester.

Remember estimation? Remember how you should develop a habit of working out roughly how big your answer should be? If you take a handful of groceries through the 10-items-or-less line, and the costs are $4.15 and $7.99 and $1.99 and $18.50, the total should be around…what? Four dollars? Ten dollars? Thirty? Five hundred? Go ahead, estimate it right now. Ben, what did you get? Well, work it out: $4.15 is about four, $7.99 is about…eight, good. Right. Right. So about thirty dollars. Not exactly thirty dollars, but something around that. More than twenty, because eight dollars and eighteen is more than twenty. But less than fifty, because this is less than ten, less than ten, less than ten, less than twenty. If you took some oranges and a tube of toothpaste and some ice cream and a frozen turkey through the checkout, you shouldn’t be spending over $200. Or if you do, maybe I should start up a grocery in your neighborhood, right? (Pause for laughter. Settle for a few grins.) And if the guy at the register says you owe $200, you should stop and make sure he hasn’t made a mistake.

Estimation is a valuable skill. It can save you money.

It can also spare you from getting caught copying answers on your homework, right? Okay. I knew this was a really wrong answer because I’d estimated. So can you. And the only way five kids get the same really wrong answer is if they’re just copying down numbers without thinking. I want you thinking. Working together is fine. Comparing answers is fine. Just copying answers is not fine, because then you’re not thinking. Okay.

I’m sure it didn’t come off that smoothly; this is the speech as it appeared in my mind, not as it came out of my mouth. But that was the basic line, and it might have worked to reinforce the idea that estimation is useful.