Helping with Homework

I was trying to get to bed early on Monday night because I had to catch a flight to the Bay Area the next morning. I was just climbing into bed when my son came in asking for some help with his girlfriend's school project. She needed to take a music file and cut it down from 4 minutes to 2. I have Audacity on my Linux machine in my office and knew it could perform the task without any issues. I reluctantly got out of bed and stumbled to my home office with son and his friend in tow.

I should have known it was not as easy a task as it sounded simply because teenagers never give you the entire truth. The first hurdle came when I plugged the thumb-drive into my computer and saw that the audio file was only 860 bytes long. Most MP3 files are in the order of 5,000,000 bytes in size, which is not a lot when you think about it. The 860 bytes told me that someone copied a link to the file instead of the actual file. Curse you Windows! At least the Mac is smart enough to know that when you drag and drop a link from the desktop to your thumb-drive, it copies the actual file, not just the link.

My next task was to locate an alternate source of the original music file. I could pay $0.99, but was really just trying to get this done as quickly as possible without spending any money. Besides, my son's girlfriend had already paid to use the song and it was the principle of the matter. So I downloaded the movie file from YouTube, striped out the audio portion, and then expanded the audio track to a .WAV file. Don't ask me about the steps I used as I didn't bother to write them all down. It wasn't a trivial task, but it wasn't too complex either.

Now I like my son's girlfriend even though she may think differently. However she really had no idea how to cut the music file down so that it was under 2 minutes long. She couldn't decide if she wanted the first 2 minutes, the last 2 minutes, or something in between. Naturally I ended up trying all 3, which takes up a lot of time as you have to listen to each segment all the way through to make sure you got the right stuff. The last 2 minutes was "yuckie" and the middle 2 minutes just didn't sound right. I just took the first 2 minutes and cut it at an appropriate spot. She ended up with 1 minute and 43 seconds of music that sounded good.

The final task was to burn the newly edited music onto a  CD. Who uses CD's any more? I tried a few different ways to create a music CD but none of them worked. After 30 minutes of frustration, my son's girlfriend asked if it was in a format she could just stick on her iPod. It was and so I gave her the file. I wish I had known that before wasting precious sleep time. Finally we were done and I could head off to bed.

I love my son but was a little irritated with this last-minute homework request. I was up an hour and a half later than intended simply to help one of his friends. Never mind that we had just come off Thanksgiving break where I had plenty of time to help with such projects. As I drifted off to sleep, I realized that even though the project was not for my son, it was important to him. Therefore it was important to me and worth giving up 90 minutes of my evening.

Geometry Homework

Last night my youngest son came and asked me to help him with his geometry homework. As part of the coursework required for my degree in electrical engineering I managed to pick up a minor in mathematics. I also have a minor in physics but that really wasn't important for last night's assignment.

Geometry is one of those topics that you really only experience at one time during your path to greater mathematical understanding. While you may continue to use one or two geometric formulas, the bulk of geometry is so different from all other topics that I was concerned I wouldn't be able to help my son.

He brought down his homework and we looked at it together. There were three proofs. His whole assignment was three problems that took up a single piece of paper. The first two problems had the hard part done. It was left to my son to label each of the steps required to go from "given" to "proof." He had done a fairly good job at guessing the labels. However the third and final problem required him to develop the steps on his own and that really had him confused.

I pulled out a scratch piece of paper and started working out the proof myself. Half a sheet of paper later, I had gone in a circle and was no closer to a solution than a monkey with a dart. So I put down my pencil and thought about the problem. Geometry proofs are like driving a car. You have a starting point and know your ending point. It is then up to you to use a series of theorems and postulates like roads to reach your destination. While it is possible to get in your car and drive around until you find your destination, a lot of gas can be wasted. It is much more efficient to map out a direct path.

I picked up my pencil and noted a couple of things that would take me from the start to the end as quickly as possible. The whole problem took about three steps and I was done. Then I could explain the problem to my son and help him get the answer on his own.

Even though it has been almost 30 years since I had geometry, I was still able to help my son with his homework. It isn't because I have a great memory and can still remember back that far. It is because geometric proofs teach you how to use simple steps to solve larger problems. That is all computer programming is. Since I have been programming for over 20 years, the skills I learned back in high-school have constantly been used and I was able to help my son. I guess I'd better apologize to my old math teacher from when I said, "I'll never use this."