My brother is in fourth-grade --he came home today and said "I passed and now I'm going to fifth-grade!"-- and one night, as he was bent over his math homework, pushing up his glasses in frustration, I came over and said these four words that I would soon come to regret: "Let me help you."

He was working on equations that I hadn't done in over a decade. Granted, I'm a high school graduate, so I should be able to come upon an answer to an elementary school question. But the methods with which they are taught now... it is all past me. I sat next to him, pushing back my hair in frustration, and finally I said, "I can't do it. I can't remember how."

And he looked at me and said, "But you're a grown-up, Patricia!"

Driving through a yellow light two days ago, I came upon this realization: either the children today are getting smarter, or the adults are getting dumber, or a combination of both. I don't know. Or maybe it's just me who is getting older and dumber. There's a 3-D puzzle model of a European castle sitting on our kitchen table (it is marked 'extremely challenging'). I cannot tell one puzzle piece from the other, yet my brother has put the front half of the castle in an hour. To me, they're an intimidating hodgepodge of cardboard bricks and mortar but to him, it makes a solid connection.