Two plus two makes four. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows it without even thinking about it. If they don’t — if they doubt it for some reason — they can just look at four things, four of anything, really: coins, beans, fingers. If you have two, and you bring two more into the group, you have four. I’m thinking about this because Teresa is having some difficulty memorizing her addition and subtraction facts. Two plus two isn’t a problem, but seven plus two makes nine didn’t want to stick in her head. Higher numbers — six plus eight makes 14, anyone? — are harder. The problem is not that she doesn’t get the logic of math. She does just fine with all the strategies she’s being taught, and she understands why they work. The other day she asked me for random sets of two-digit numbers to add using compensation. For fun. And if you don’t get what adding with compensation is, look at a second-grade math workbook. It’s just the rote learning of the facts that’s a problem. Use flashcards, her teachers say. Any mention of flashcards elicits a roll of the eyes. Doing them can mean 30 minutes for 15 cards as she works out the answer to each problem rather than trying to just come up with it from memory, and her mind wanders through snack possibilities, games to play with the dog, any social drama that needs a full accounting and, well, pretty much anything beyond the fact that seven plus five makes 12. Although, after a minute or so, she can tell you the answer because seven plus three makes 10 and two more is 12. I don’t remember this being so hard when I was 7. Then again, I don’t remember anyone trying to make me understand why addition worked (beyond maybe counting pictures of apples I don’t know why it was always apples) until maybe sixth or seventh grade. We were simply expected to know six plus nine is 15, almost as if we were taking it on faith. A year or so later, when it came time to learn multiplication tables, we had to know that six times nine was 54, without anyone ever drawing a picture of 54 of anything. Of course, we don’t have to take math on faith; much like Teresa is doing, we can figure it all out logically. It’s just easier not to have to think about it every time we want to know how many more doughnuts we need to choose to make a dozen. The tenets of faith — that God exists; that he created the world and all of us; that Jesus became human, died and returned to life to save us from our sins — can’t be proven, even if we can see signs of God and God’s love in the world and the people around us. But with the gift of faith, we can know, in our hearts, that God is here, in our good times and in our bad times. For math, we have logic. And flashcards.