Show your work

I think I've mentioned before that I go in on Thursdays to tutor two Hispanic fifth-grade girls. One is from Mexico and the other is from Guatemala. The task I've been given is to help them with their English and, for the most part, it's been a pretty easy task to follow. Sometimes we can't understand each other (we speak different languages...in more ways than one), but we can usually laugh about it. Last week, however, we delved into territory that made me break into a cold sweat. Story problems.

I was never a wiz at math. I stuck with it in high school, but it was tough. Story problems, then, are those great ways to try to get students to think differently. Instead of 2+2=4, it's "Bobby has two apples and then goes to the store and buys two more. How many apples does Bobby have?" Except story problems are rarely that easy. The only thing more challenging, then, in trying to explain story problems to fifth-graders is explaining story problems to fifth-graders whose first language is Spanish. As we looked at the second problem, it had something to do with bags of chocolates and boxes of taffy and each student was supposed to get one piece of candy and I can't remember the rest. I do know it took me a good five minutes to figure it out. Once I did, I then saw those dreaded words: Show your work. Why? I wondered. I can get the right answer, why do I have to show you? I regressed 27 years or so and then had the challenge of trying to explain this to the girls. It was a tough day.

You might see where I'm going with this. Christians might wonder sometime, why should I show my work? Isn't it enough that I simply have the "right" beliefs? Accepting Jesus as my savior and all that? Doesn't that get me the one-way ticket to heaven? Some people don't like the book of James, but there it is: "So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead" (James 2:17). We've got to show our work, too.