Raising a child with Developmental Differences means celebrating wins in unexpected places, and laughing at the unexpected places where things go sideways. Today’s story has a little of both.
Tommy is in a special education class at school, and a little while ago, they started practicing “money math.” Using real coins, he works through problems like: five 10-yen coins make 50 yen, and 50 yen plus 50 yen makes 100 yen.
Once numbers get too big to count on his fingers, calculating becomes tough. But with actual money in his hands, he seems to get a real feel for the tens and hundreds places.
Here’s the part that still amazes me: when the problem is written out in column form, he can do three-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication. (Division is still a work in progress.)
Maybe it’s part of his Neurodevelopmental Traits, but Tommy is great at following rules. Math is really just following a set of steps, so it’s one of his strengths.
But here’s the catch…
The moment language enters the picture, it’s a whole different story. Language is where he struggles the most.
Word problems? He’s completely lost. And it’s not that he can’t tell whether to add or subtract. He has no idea what the question is even asking.
Take this one: “You have 2 candies. Someone gives you 3 more. How many do you have now?” Tommy’s answer: “Yummy! I hope you eat lots of them.”
So when his science and social studies tests come home, we crack up every single time. His answers always read like he’s chatting with his teacher. But you can tell he worked hard on every one of them, and maybe that’s why he sometimes gets a big, mysterious, generous circle (in Japan, that’s the mark for “correct”) anyway.
Then, after he started practicing money math, Tommy announced that he wanted to go shopping by himself.
He often goes to the neighborhood candy shop with his friends. But he still can’t handle the money part on his own, so his friends help him pick things he can afford, and the grandmother who runs the shop helps him take the coins out of his wallet. He gets a lot of help from the people around him.
And a store with a checkout counter? He’s only ever been to those with me or his dad. We usually pay cashless, too, so I honestly wondered if he’d have any idea how to pay with cash.
So we ran a trial. Tommy wanted a hash brown from FamilyMart (a Japanese convenience store), so we went together once.
“Take it out of the display case, seal the bag with a piece of tape, bring it to the register, and pay. Put it in your bag, carry it home, and eat it there.” Perfect!
Today, we went over it one more time, and then I sent him off. Waiting for him to come back felt like forever.
When he finally walked in, he was holding a bottle of strawberry milk.
???
It turns out the hash browns were sold out, so he bought strawberry milk from a vending machine instead.
Oh well! If he was going to buy something anyway, I wish he’d gone back into the store. We practiced so hard! It wasn’t quite a scene from Old Enough!, but I’d hoped it would be a good experience.
Tommy, though, is fired up for a rematch. So we’ll try again soon!