Math Therapy

What does ten's place, hundred's place, thousandth's place REALLY MEAN?

10, 100, 1000... is there a ten thousandth's place? or a hundred thousandth's place?

I'm not stupid, but I still can't figure out how to do this problem:

1000

- 1

---------

Does borrowing mean you give it back at some point?

I think a big problem with me and math is linguistics. Perhaps if this type of subtraction wasn't called borrowing, but instead, stealing, or capturing or just plain "taking" I would be able to conceptually visualize it better. I never really learned how to subtract using borrowing, and I feel incredibly dumb about it, and incredibly TERRIFIED that if I have to teach 5th grade math next year, I am going to FAIL, and all of my students will hate math because they will pick up that I hate math, and I won't be able to teach them how to borrow in subtraction because I don't know how.

Tom Keyes, my How-To-Teach-Math-To-Elementary-School-Students-Guru, who usually makes me feel pumped up about math, today gave us a word problem called "The Goat."

It went something like this:

A goat is tethered to a shed that is 4m by 5m, and his rope is attached to a corner of the shed. His rope is 6m long. What is the amount of area the goat can get to?

I instantly felt down, and nervous, and gloomy. A familiar chest pain I used to get as a child when I was frustrated with math reappeared.

Luckily, I was sitting next to Kayla the math whiz, who figured it out using a formula for the circumference of a circle, and divided, subtracted, and then she used critical thinking skills to estimate the area around the corners of the shed, did the circumference formula again and divided the answer by 4, and 2, and 1---and scribbled a whole lot of other numbers in there that mean't nothing to me.

Tom Keyes likes to do what I think is Math Group Therapy after we do problems. I told him I had no motivation to do math, and who cares about the goat anyway? A couple other math-haters came out of the closet, too.

I told him how I didn't know how to borrow in subtraction, and that I want to know. I told him that I'm scared to teach math, and have overall very low self-efficacy about my math performance.

He promised to teach me how to borrow in subtraction tomorrow.

Finally. It's about time.