Subtraction by carry-over method

On Wednesday, I met up with my sister for a cup of coffee at the Barista outlet on Camac Street. The last time I met her, she still looked like a kid. Somehow, this time she seemed more mature. On my saying so, she just smiled and told me that it wasn’t maturity that was showing on her face, it was just that she had aged considerably since the last time we met.

Well documented references to emotional outbursts of the female species on uncomplimentary remarks about beauty and ageing started shooting around my head. In a classic reference to the movie 300, I told myself “Choose your next words carefully, for they may well be your last.”

Fortunately, the crisis was past even as I gulped and thankfully noted the absence of ancient wells which looked more like holes in the ground. My sister just looked at me and said, “This is because of the job that I’ve taken up.”

“Hey,” I said. “How tough could it be to teach mathematics to children of classes 1, 2 and 3?”

Turns out, its quite a handful. Apparently, the laws of subtraction by carry-over method are confusing to the simplified world of kids. My sister proceeded to fill me in on how she managed to break down the task and first involve the kids in practicing the subtraction by carry-over method for 2-digit numbers and then gently progress to the demonic 3-digit numbers.

And it is not as if the kids are without their share of naughtiness. “I get eve-teased by 8 year olds,” my sis giggled. On the recently conducted Independence Day festivities, 5 or 6 of these Lilliputians surrounded my sis and started going around in circles, shouting their young throats dry while singing “Nanna munna raahi hoon…”; a song my sister had taught them only a couple of days ago.