D'juh Want an Exponent With That?

This morning, at breakfast, my daughter asked my wife if she'd seen the copy of her homework that I'd made yesterday; my wife said that she had, including the two pages from the web that I had located, though she had not read that in any detail.

My daughter then talked for five minutes about how you do the problems that she'd had. This, from a kid who, though usually pretty cheerful, is not much of a breakfast table conversationalist. I then asked if her instructor had used the phrase 'common ratio'; she said that she had not, and I said 'Well, in your explanation, it sounds like what you're calling this is what the web page calls that - so the page is actually talking about the same thing.' She then took the page and looked at it, and finally agreed that it might be -- but they hadn't talked about the theory underlying what she'd done, just the 'how to do it'.

I consider that to be a pretty successful conversation.