An Afternoon in the Life of One Volunteer

The math problem was: A baseball player averages one hit in every three at-bats. If the player bats 480 times during a season, how many hits can the player be expected to get?

That sounds easy enough. I was worried when I heard I’d be helping with math – it has never been my strong suit. But when I saw it was ratios we were working with I figured we could muddle our way through. After all, this particular type of math was still using the 1 is to 5 as 2 is to ‘n’. It even had tables to fill out: 1/5 = 2/n, for example.

I can do this stuff. I was ready. Nafisa was ready. 1 is to 3 as ‘n’ is to 480. No problem. The first wrinkle – what is baseball? Well, it’s a game where one player hits a ball with a bat and this (pointing to the problem) player, every 3 times he tries to hit the ball he hits it once. What’s a bat? Except it sounds like ba-it or sometimes ba-ut or ba-out. Either Nafisa’s ears don’t hear the ‘a’ of bat or her mouth cannot make the sound. I wonder how many sounds in her language my ears don’t even hear, or how many sounds my mouth would not be able to make. Anyway, a bat is a wooden thing, like a big stick, you hit a ball with. What’s an at-bat? That’s each time you try to hit the ball with the bat.

How do you complete a table, how do you even begin a table when you have no idea what it is you are talking about? “Baseball” doesn’t fit in the table, but it is at least one thing Nafisa seems to comprehend about this game.

Well, we muddle through, I even pretend to be swinging to hit a ball with a pencil, until I realize how utterly ridiculous that must look to someone who has no idea what it is I am doing. Once we have the table filled in, most of which I just did, she got it right away. She can do the math. But what in the h__l is an at-bat? It isn’t anything.

Next math problem. On a basketball team, the ratio of players less than six feet tall to players six feet or taller is 2 to 5. If 10 players on the team are six feet or taller, how many players are less than six feet tall?

Basketball – now we are getting somewhere. Even the newest Somali arrivals know what basketball is and so does Nafisa. Yeah, a word we can start with!

But, alas, what is “six feet or taller”? What is less than six feet tall? After trying to explain this we end up with 2 are short for every 5 who are taller. The way the sentence is written is hardly clear. In the table Nafisa wants to include six somehow. Six is to what as 5 is to what? Six isn’t any number in the ratio, but Nafisa is zeroed in on six. Once again, I fill in the table. Once the numbers are in place Nafisa does the math. She gets this stuff but …

Problem #3. Last year during league bowling, Jeremy averaged one strike for every five frames he bowled. If he bowled 84 strikes last season, how many frames did he bowl?

Nafisa begins. How many leagues were there, she wants to know? Well, there weren’t any, that kind of means the same as year. (Oh really?) How many Jeremys were there? Well, Jeremy is a boy’s name. Oh. OK, do you know what bowling is? No. It’s a game where you roll a ball down a long narrow lane, no ... hall, and you try to knock down 10 pins, things at the end of it. Oh. So, every 5 times Jeremy tries to hit the things down with the ball he gets one strike. You mean like in baseball where after three of them you can’t try to hit the ball any more? Well, no, that’s ... that’s … that’s something entirely different. Oh.

Once again, as soon as the table is laid out she does the math. And it’s right. But I’m getting nervous. Those who are real teachers at Trinity would strongly object to the fact that I am preparing and filling in the tables. They would say, “How can she learn if she doesn’t do it on her own?” Well, I just don’t know.

Problem #4 In a gymnastics meet, a gymnast earned a perfect score of ten from one out of every four judges. If there were eight judges altogether at the meet, how many perfect scores did the gymnast earn? Can you see where this is going? 10 is to ? as ? is to what?

Well, 10 really has nothing to do with the problem. Oh. We have to think about the number of judges and the number of perfect scores. Oh. Why is ten a perfect score? I don’t really know … It doesn’t really matter because they changed that this year ... oh, wait, no, that was figure skating. Trust me, it doesn’t matter. This time we do somehow get the table figured out faster and her math is again correct.

It’s 5:30. Time to close up. Whew. Nafisa thanks me over and over. We each go home. It was a great way to spend 1 1/2 hours.