IN MY HOUSEHOLD, there is one parent who paints T-shirts on the kitchen table with the kids and their friends, and one parent who buys books as birthday presents.
I am that latter parent, and my approval rating shows it. Two out of two children do not approve of the job I am doing as their mother.
In other words, 100 percent of the minors in my family are #F dissatisfied with how I am handling the responsibilities of the mother.
I have a problem only children's author Jon Scieszka can solve. It might appear to be a child-rearing problem or a personality problem, but it is really a math problem. That's because "you can think of almost everything as a math problem."
That's what Mrs. Fibonacci, the math teacher, said, and as a result the heroine of Scieszka's new book, "Math Curse," spends the day lost in a forest of formulas. ("How many yards in a neighborhood? How many feet in my shoes? Does tuna fish + tuna fish = fournafish?")
Scieszka, whose surname is a spelling problem, is the manic superstar of kid lit who first grabbed the microphone in 1989 with his version of fairy tales as stand-up comedy.
"The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs" by A. Wolf ("You can call me Al") became an instant classic, and Scieszka followed with "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales," a smart-mouthed and edgy retelling of classic fairy tales that found a secondary audience among the hip and childless -- so much so that it has been advertised on "Friends" and Letterman.
Now the 41-year-old former math teacher and father of two ("a daughter who reads and a son who would rather skate") has produced "Math Curse" with his favorite illustrating partner, Lane Smith, whose offbeat art illustrates that he is just as nuts as Scieszka is.
The book is a hoot. There are real math problems everywhere. In the price: [($3.25 + $1.75) x 3] + $1.99 = $16.99. In the dedication: "If the sum of my nieces and nephews equals 15 and their product equals 54, and I have more nephews than nieces, how many nephews and how many nieces is this book dedicated to?"
There are sly references to math history, and there is plenty of real math, including logic and a proof.
Best of all, "Math Curse" is common ground for my daughter, who reads, and my son, who would rather do anything else. Taken together, these children are a proof of the illogical statement that boys are good in math and girls are not.
