Day 14 - Power returns

A few days ago I wrote about a ‘Low Power’ day - when the faculty was suffering from a power outage. Day 14 of the School of Dad comes five days after Day 13 because of an actual power outage. The remnants of Hurricane Ike moved through the state of Ohio on Sunday, bring near hurricane force winds and leaving much of the state in the dark when it left. Our home was only out of power for 10 hours, but the damage in the area had the schools closed on Monday and Tuesday. While there was nothing technically stopping the School of Dad from being in session, the presence of Ben’s brother and sister made that impractical. Yesterday we sat and reviewed the many things I hoped to accomplish this week. The hope was that he would do a little work yesterday to lessen the load on the rest of the week. He chose not to. I had been prepared to back off on some items but his lack of participation yesterday made me rethink that.

We have a large list of things to accomplish by week’s end. Ben did not exactly seem recharged this morning, but he was back in school mode and we moved ahead.

I was reviewing some school work last night while waiting for Ben ad choir practice.
As we were driving I asked, "Ben, do you know what Absolute Value is?"
"Huh?"
"Have you heard the term Absolute Value?"
"Nope."
"Well, Absolute Value is just the distance of a number from zero," I told him.
I was about to explain it further when he said, "So the Absolute Value of a positive number is the number and for a negative number it is the number without the negative."
"Yes."
"Why would you need to know that?"