Doing My Duty

One Wednesday or so a month, you can find me at the Algonquin Library from 6:30 - 8:30 tutoring kids in math. I enjoy it, but it does provide for some surreal experiences. Take tonight. We were quite busy so I was handling 3 students at once. Normally, this doesn't stress me a whole lot, but the issue was the subjects. One tutee was studying about polygons, one was studying exponential growth and decay, and the third was in AP Calculus doing derivatives with the product, quotient, and chain rules. This disparity resulted in some interesting conversations, like the following:
"So, when you add the angles of a quadrilateral, what should you get?" *turn to student 2* "If you are given the population is increasing by 3%, what should your growth factor be?" *turn to student 3* "What rule do you need to use when finding the derivative of x/(x²+2)^1/2?" *turn back to student one* "That's right, so if you are given 3 angles of a quadrilateral, what do you need to do to find the fourth?" *turn to student 2* "Close, but if the population is increasing, should your growth factor be less than or greater than one?" *turn to student 3* "Good, you correctly used the quotient rule, but there's a little problem with g(x). We can't directly take the derivative of (x²+2)^1/2, so what rule should we apply to find that?"
It was a rather exhausting session tonight. So much so that I looked at the clock and said "Is it only 7:30?" Despite all that, I really love doing this. Lauren is funny too, because Mommy has told her I couldn't put her to bed tonight because I had to help kids at the library. So, when I went in to say good night, she asks "You help kids?". She asked about the kids and why daddy helps them, but she does seem to understand this is a good thing and the kids need daddy. It's quite touching.