I Have a Finance Degree and I Cannot Do My Son's P5 Maths Homework

I want to tell you about the evening I handed a worksheet back to my ten-year-old son and said, "I actually don't know how to do this."

He looked at me with the particular expression children reserve for moments when the scaffolding of parental authority makes an audible cracking sound. He wasn't even smug about it. That was the worst part. He just looked a little lost, because if I couldn't do it, who was going to?

I have a finance degree from a decent university. I work with numbers every day. I can build a DCF model in Excel without looking anything up. And I could not solve my son's P5 maths homework problem.

The problem involved something called the bar model method. If you are the parent of a child currently navigating the Hong Kong primary curriculum, you already know what I'm talking about and you have my sympathy. If your child is not yet in primary school, let me prepare you: the Hong Kong maths curriculum uses a visual problem-solving approach where quantities are represented as rectangular bars. It is elegant, actually. It teaches children to think about relationships between numbers in a way that pure computation doesn't. I understand this now. In the moment, sitting at our kitchen table at 9:15pm, I understood nothing.

What I learned in school in the 1990s was arithmetic. You set up the equation, you solve for x. The bar model doesn't work that way. It's visual, intuitive, relational. It assumes you can see the problem as a picture first. My brain — trained for twenty years in spreadsheets and formulas — could not make that shift. I kept trying to set up an algebra equation. My son kept looking at me like I was speaking Cantonese with a British accent.

The specific question that broke me: "Tom has 3 times as many stickers as Jerry. If Tom gives 24 stickers to Jerry, they will have the same number. How many stickers does Tom have?" I know — reading it back now I can solve it algebraically in thirty seconds. But the worksheet expected a bar model solution. The teacher had taught them a specific visual method. Showing a different method — even a correct one — would lose marks, and possibly confuse my son further.

I Googled "bar model method P5 Hong Kong" at 9:30pm. I found YouTube videos. I watched three of them. I still couldn't teach it fluently enough to be useful. My son, who had been paying attention in class, actually understood it better than I did. He ended up explaining it to me, which was mortifying and also, honestly, one of the better educational moments in our house in recent memory.

But it raised a real problem: I had been assuming, for six years of primary school, that I would be able to backstop my son's maths learning at home. The curriculum through P3 allowed that fiction. P5 ended it.

What I did: I hired a maths tutor the following week. I'll write more about tutoring costs another time (short version: a lot), but I want to be honest about what I wish I'd done earlier. I wish I had sat down with my son's P4 maths workbooks before the school year started and actually worked through them myself — not to become an expert, but to find out where my gaps were before they became his problem. I also wish I had watched the tutorial videos proactively, not frantically at 9:30pm.

What I also did: I stopped pretending. This matters more than I initially admitted. My son had picked up, over years of homework sessions, that I was performing confidence I didn't always have. When I started saying "I'm not sure, let's look this up together" instead of guessing and getting it wrong with authority, something shifted. He became more willing to say he didn't understand something, because I was modelling that not-knowing is a step, not a failure.

The humiliating truth about the bar model incident is that my finance brain was actually the obstacle. I was pattern-matching to algebra because that's what I know, and that pattern was wrong for this problem. The lesson my son's maths curriculum was trying to teach — think visually, think relationally, before you reach for the formula — was genuinely useful. I just couldn't receive it.

He's in P6 now. I don't do homework with him the way I used to. The tutor handles the actual maths. What I do is ask him to explain a concept to me at dinner, and I try — genuinely try — to understand it in the way he learned it, not the way I would have done it. Sometimes he catches my errors. Honestly, good.

Some nights I look at his worksheet and know immediately how to solve it. Some nights I look at it and have no idea. The difference is that now neither of us is embarrassed about which night it is.

That feels like something. Maybe even something worth the finance degree.