The Poetry of Reason; The Art of Ideas

My Students

I love math. When I first meet them, my students don't. Today, 1 week after classes began, my students taught me three legitimately new and distinct and beautiful solutions to a classic problem in math--the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100. I am lucky to be where I am.

My kids are just like kids everywhere: if you love them and support them, they live and dream beyond what seems possible; and if you neglect and ignore them, they grow to be angry, unsettled, and insecure.

What people don't realize is how quickly a child can recognize the opportunity to recover the love and support they need, and in that same move recover their better selves. Here's an example: I am one week into school, and just getting started on some wickedly challenging and mind-bending connections between geometry, algebra, and common sense. Students are struggling hard, and that's a good thing. One student was about to give up and you could see it on her face. She was literally pulling on her hair out of frustration. All I said was, "Don't worry. We support you. You'll get it." As she left class she handed me a folded piece of notebook paper: "Thank you for not giving up on me. A lot of people do."

My Project

Math is the poetry of reason. It's not a cutesy thing, and it's not easy. Math is art you make with ideas. Math is a mind you can use to think thoughts that the human brain could never handle. Because ideas are free (pun very intended), my class doesn't need much besides some augmentation of the very limited brain. If our brain's working memory was a lot larger, we wouldn't need paper. If our mind weren't so prone to habit, we wouldn't need to read so many books to help us stay creative. But, we do have these limitations, and so we do need books and paper. I am requesting an assortment of challenging books, 10 packs of quality pencils, rulers, and 30 reams of paper so that they can have challenging assignments to work on. To be honest, what I am requesting are the bare essentials for learning. Paper so that I can give my students assignments, pencils so that students with rough home lives can feel well-equipped in class, and books so that they can learn beyond the classroom.

I don't enjoy lots of frills when it comes to learning.

I want to get to the core of what a subject is seeking both for myself and for my students. So far as I can tell, all you really need to do engaging mathematics is paper and pencil, books to read, and an inspiring person to encourage you. I am doing everything I can to be that person for my students, and this year, I've felt them to be incredibly receptive to it. Now all I need is pencil, paper, and some books!