Teaching Math or Driver’s Ed

And other ways to cheese off your kids

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Mom, Dad’s yelling at me!”

That’s my daughter’s response to my barely disguised irritation.

Those of you who haven’t tried to teach your teen daughter math may not fully appreciate what I’m talking about. The child who coos to me each night, “Daddy, don’t ever leave me,” is ready to punch me in the face. All my well-intentioned resolve not to raise my voice, to be patient, and to break the information down into simple steps vanishes in a moment.

This is the same child who can recount, scene by scene, what happened in the Bollywood movie she watched a week ago; who, even while doing something on Instagram on her iPhone, after a cursory glance at Step Up 2 playing on the TV, can reproduce every body-twisting dance move that no father wants his daughter to do. Yet, ask her to recount the math solution I spent the previous ten minutes showing her, and she gives me this glazed look.

As my dad used to tell me, “If you were dumb, I could at least console myself that my son’s a fool. But, I know you are not dumb. Which can only mean that you’re doing this on purpose.”

Guess the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

We’re pulled over to the side of a tree-lined road that runs through what passes for a major thoroughfare in Bangalore. My daughter’s on the verge of tears. I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut and breathe out slowly — counting in my head. If I’d thought teaching math was hard, little did I know, teaching driving was impossible. All the love and goodwill built over the previous sixteen years was leaking away on that roadside. I’d yelled — yep, screamed, partly in fear — when it had appeared she was going to swipe the three guys who were strolling on the side of the road, or, at the very least, graze them with a side-view mirror.

Took me back all the way to when she was a kid — and had done something naughty. I can’t even recall what she’d done, but old reliable me had yelled at her. A few nanoseconds after the words left my mouth, the look on her face — as though I’d struck her — stopped me dead in my tracks. The guilt that swamped me would have made any God-fearing Catholic proud (which, in itself, might have made Jack Donaghy feel oddly guilty).

Here we were, ten years later, and little seemed to have changed.

Guess before I try to teach my daughter anything more, there are a few things I need to learn first.