August 2, 2000

My wife, Gina, and I were baby sitting with our nine-year-old granddaughter, Jessica, last week. Jess spent a lot of time hanging out with her nine-year old friend, Kaitlyn. And the girls had been pretty creative about finding things to do. But this was our second day together and the kids were running out of ideas. Finally, Jess came to us and said that there was nothing to do. And she was bored.

Nine-year-old kids have plenty of energy to burn so Gina and I looked around the house for some activity where they could use their energy. We remembered that over the weekend our son, Brian, had hosted a big cookout. And before Brian went to work he asked us to put out the empty bottles and cans for the trash man.

Gina and I are big on recycling so we asked the girls if they would get the cans and bottles ready for the redemption center. The girls headed for the garage and began to sort the cans and bottles. But it wasn’t long before they came back to us and told us that the job was too boring.

Gina has the math mind in our family so she asked the girls to estimate how many bottles and cans they thought were in the garage. The kids gave estimates between 100 to 1000. But they didn’t give the estimates much thought. And they had very little interest in this project.

Gina then asked the girls how much each can or bottle was worth at the redemption center. The kids didn’t know. So we had them read the labels on the cans and they found out that each can was worth five cents. Gina then had the girls multiply their estimates by five cents. Jessica saw that her estimate of 1000 cans would be worth $50.00. Now the kids were interested.

They went back into the garage and began sorting the cans and the bottles and putting them into boxes. I could hear them talking about the money as they worked. And they were excited. But after a few minutes the girls came in and asked us some questions. Who was going to get the money? How much were they going to make for their efforts?

Well, those were very important questions. So the four of us talked about a fair way to divide up the work and the money. And we agreed that the four of us would work at this project and we would divide up the profits equally among the four of us. They thought this was fair so they became very willing workers in our project.

Well, after a lot of work we packed all the booty into boxes and loaded my car. And now we were off to the redemption center to cash in. We grabbed two push carts outside the redemption center. We loaded up. And we were ready. Gina got into her math again. She had the girls keep all of the receipts from the redemption machines—just to make sure we got all the money we deserved.

It took a while before the machines accepted all of the bottles and all of the cans. But finally, the cans and the bottles were all in. The empty packages were in the trash cans. And we were now ready to cash in big time.

But Gina took charge again with her math mind. She had the girls take all the receipts and add them together to get our total profits. The kids couldn’t believe it. $l4.00. Wow!

We went to the check-out counter and the lady added up our receipts. She also came up with $14.00- and it’s a good thing she did. And when the lady began counting out our cash the kids were really smiling. Now the kids asked another big question. How much money would each of them get?

So we had them figure it out. And when kids are in for a payday they can be very creative. The girls figured out that $14.00 divided by 4 gives us $3.50 each. Now we had the lady give us enough change so we each received our share of the profits.

Well, now we had cash in our pockets. And we were off to spend some of it. We decided after all that hard work in the hot sun we needed an ice cream cone to cool us off. We headed downtown and pulled into the local ice cream parlor and took a look at the menu. We told the girls that they could buy what they wanted. But they would have to pay for their own cone with their new money. Now the girls checked out the menu and also the prices of the cones. Now they were dealing with real money from their own pockets.

When we had made our decisions and were enjoying our ice cream Gina asked the girls how much money they had left. And then she asked them how much their ice cream had cost them. The pens were out again and the girls checked their money with their accounting figures. Now all the math minds were working.

As we were getting ready to leave Jess wanted to know how many cans and bottles we had turned in. We told the girls that the lady had our receipts so we couldn’t use that. But after a little problem-solving the girls came up with dividing $14.00 by .05 cents. They came up with 280 as the total for cans and bottles. And they thought that was a lot of work.

Then Kaitlyn wanted to know if they had packed more bottles or more cans. Well, the receipts were gone and even Gina’s math mind was stumped. As we drove home the girls were in the back seat kicking around ways to solve this math puzzle. "Maybe if we took our total profits and divided by 2 –or maybe…"

P. S. I promised the girls that I would have Gina double-check all the math computation in the column so we wouldn’t be embarrassed by any math errors.