Home and Hope: Conversation Over Dinner

I piled the plate with the casserole and sat across from the mother and two kids. Volunteers for Home and Hope not only prepare dinner but engage in dinnertime conversation with the guests.

A.J. corrected his mother on her word usage. Disrespect by pre-teens toward parents is not unusual, but it's atypical to show it by means of vocabulary.

Do you like to read, A.J.? He shook his head.

"He likes math," said five-year-old Taylor, who immediately peppered him with addition problems using the biggest numbers she knew, i.e., "what's 100+50?" Addition being no sweat, a couple of questions about multiplication quickly showed that he had mastered those tables, too.

But math, in fact any subject, should be fun, not a test. I recounted the story about a famous mathematician who as a child was asked to calculate the total of the series

1+2+3+4+5....+100 = ??

(This is a familiar tale, but perhaps there are a few humanities majors reading this.) The child solved the problem quickly, confounding his teacher. How did he do it? A.J. puzzled for a minute, then shook his head.

Using pen and paper, I wrote the series in reverse order:

1+2+3+4+5....+100
100+99+98+97...+1

The total of the two series is 101+101+101+... one hundred times. So the solution is 100 x 101 divided by 2, or 5,050.

The mathematician was Carl Gauss, (1777-1855) who was seven when he came up with the answer.

A.J. enjoyed hearing about how kids in those days were pretty smart, too. If I see him again on Thursday night [update: i didn't--they had dinner elsewhere], we'll resume talking about how people, before computers, could still accomplish a lot by just using pen and paper.