Not Smarter than a 5th Grader...

It is official, I'm not smarter than a 5th grader. In fact, I'm not even smarter than a 4th grader. (Don't tell my grad school though...they might kick me out:))

As many of you know, I am nannying for a precious family of 7 kids! They are wonderful and I LOVE them. I like to feel like I am helpful around the house. But tonight I am not so sure.

The oldest 2 kids who are in 4th and 5th grade needed some help with their math homework. And I figure, "hey, I have a college degree (never mind that is in English), I can do this!" Well, not so much. First I was confronted with a word problem that went something like this:

A man went to the store to pick up some groceries. The store was 20 miles away from his house. On the way there he traveled at 30 mph. On the way home, he hit some traffic and traveled at 12 mph. How long did the round trip take him?

SERIOUSLY? I don't know, and don't really care. The real question I was asking was why in the heck this man went to a store 20 miles away? What could he possibly need?

Then, if that word problem wasn't bad enough, the next thing I had to tackle was Algebra. I honestly can't remember the last time I had to do math with letters. The page looked something like this:

x + 3x = x + x + 10

6x + 1 = 4x + x

8 + x + 7x + 10000x = 2x + 12x - 15x

4th grade math? Really?!?! Looks like Greek to me!

Whatever, I can read Greek! This is a whole new ball game!

If anyone knows where I can pick up a good calculator, or Word Problems for Dummies, please let me know. I'd hate for my precious children to fail their math homework on account of their genius or not so much baby-sitter!

HELP!

PS. If any of my math genius siblings are reading this and know the answers... please don't comment. I KNOW you are smarter than me. No need to rub it in!