Cake offcuts
BBM and Pinkxi looked forward to their weekly trip to the bakery on Thursday afternoons because it’s when Pinkxi got to pick her favorite bag of cake offcuts. A generous bag of offcuts goes for $3.50-$4.50! Not only were they cheap as chips, they were yummilicious and more than enough to go into her lunchbox for the coming school week.
BBM wanted to use these opportunities to teach Pinkxi simple subtraction with the change that she got back from every purchase. It was also for Pinkxi to gather up her guts and learn to converse with a stranger when she is at the cashier. To sweeten the experience, BBM suggested that if she could calculate correctly and got back the exact amount of change, she will get to keep them in her piggy bank.
The experience started off well but in recent weeks, Pinkxi began to have problems getting her head around working out the subtraction. She had memorised the amount of change on their initial visits and that, of course, would not work when the cost of cake or the amount of money BBM handed her changed. Pinkxi began to buckle under the ‘pressures’ of the situation….not only did she have to communicate with the friendly baker over the counter, she needed to figure out her subtraction so as to keep the change and grab home a bag of off-cuts.
BBM tried refreshing how subtraction would work for different denominations and how much change she was likely to receive, before they stepped into the bakery nowadays. He also tried keeping it simple by using the same amount of money used to pay at the cashier. But this resulted in a increasingly clamped up critter. Not only had she refused to hear what BBM’s trying to teach her, Pinkxi had even declared that she stopped liking these cakes and could not be bothered with the spare change for her piggy bank. Well, pretty much any excuse just to avoid swinging by the bakery on Thursday afternoons.
Indeed, it had even got to a point that she would not perform simple mental additions and subtraction when BBM’s asked her to. BBM has never quite grown a good head for maths when he was younger but he was really concerned if the bakery experience had a negative impact on her nascent interest in the subject altogether.
BBM thinks he needs a huge dose of expert advice soon.
>> Back to Growing Up with Pinkxi.