From Russia With Love

So the way MES is setup is that the kids have different lessons in the morning and in the afternoons they have electives (like piano, chess, karate, etc.) and homework time. So in the afternoons, I play with the kids who are finished with their homework or try to help them with homework as best as possible (which is sometimes tricky). Anyway, I was trying to help one boy, Yuroslav, with math and I looked at the book and first of all, the directions are of course written in Russian so that makes it a little difficult, but also they write their numbers differently (basically they're the same, but they're sort of old fashioned looking...ha I even tried practicing writing like them and I'm pretty good at it). So I looked at the problem and it had to do with meters (or metres if you're British), centimeters, and decimeters and I just stared at the book and I had absolutely no idea where to even start. So then I got the idea to get out a ruler thinking that this might give me some insight because 12 inches is on one ruler and that equals a foot. Then I remembered my Latin roots and centi- means 100 and deci- means 10 and I looked at the problem again and still had no clue. So I had to google "metric system." Embarrassing. But thank goodness for google. I mean, really, what did people do before google? Or Wikipedia? Look things up in the encyclopedia, I guess. But I did figure it out, so you can be proud of me.