Next time my kids complain about homework with fractions, I will tell them about my classmate Frank. 

Frank, aka Frankie, wears fantastic stars-and-stripes workboots and has mad drywall skills. Tasked with measuring trim for a door jamb, Frank explained how he added up all the quarters and eighths and sixteenths of the various layers in the wall.

It was like a word problem on my kids’ homework: One sheet of 3/4-inch sheetrock, plus a two-by-four (which is actually only 3 1/2 inches wide), plus a 3/8-inch sheet of OSB, and a shim or two…

We all scratched our heads for a minute, while I thought about my kids’ blood feud with the dreaded Least Common Denominator. I can’t wait to tell them they really do need to learn that stuff.

As Frankie says, “Fractions are real in this game.”