Mini-Me isn’t called Mini-Me for no reason. She really is so much like me, and sometimes it drives me nuts. Behold this little gem of a conversation we had while I was checking her math homework. They’re studying fractions and this particular question was asking about the shaded area of a 1″ square. The square was divided into eight equal parts and three of those were shaded.

me: Number 30 is wrong.
her: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that one.
me: Okay, well, the shaded part represents a fraction of the whole.
her: I don’t know how to multiply fractions.
me: You haven’t studied that yet?
her: [look of utter disgust that I didn't already know that] No.
me: Well, you really don’t even have to do that. You can figure it out just by looking at it.
her: Didn’t you just tell me that area equals length times width?
me: Yeah, but in this case you just look and see that 3 of the 8 squares are shaded.
her: Mom, that’s not how you do it!
me: Okay, then how do you do it?
her: I don’t know! They’ve never taught us how to do this!
me: [struggling to keep from laughing] Then how do you know I’m not doing it the right way?
her: [look of disgust returns] Because!

You get the picture. Finally, I had to actually multiply the fractions of the shaded area to get the area and show her that, indeed, it works out the same whichever way you do it. Of course, if you’re in 5th grade and you haven’t yet learned how to multiply fractions, it would make sense to just take the easy route, but then again… we are talking about Mini-Me.