Wait... These Little Squiggles Have Meaning?

When I was a little kid (the year before kindergarten), my parents put me in preschool. I learned the letters in the English alphabet and some basic addition and counting. Nothing monumental, but it was definitely learning.  

Then I hit kindergarten. I was already reading, pronouncing lots of "advanced" words, spelling, reading, all of that. I was immediately targeted as an "advanced" student. I didn't realize it at the time, (actually, I just kind of put this together five minutes ago) (that time being 11:10 pm) but I was probably, at that time, setting myself up to be an educator. 

ANYWAY... Reading. I was always reading. In first grade, I was part of an advanced reading program in the classroom. When the other students were reading out of the classroom readers, I was reading other selections and testing my comprehension of the short stories or situations presented. (Not Accelerated Reader. That comes later.) I also got put in Gifted and Talented, a type of special out-of-classroom special education for the "advanced" students.

When I got to second grade, and all the way through to 7th grade, I was in the Accelerated Reader program. We read books on "the list" and took short comprehension quizzes on the books, and earned AR points based on how we scored on the test (usually out of 10 or 20 questions) I bought into it until about halfway through 4th grade, at which point, I'd basically read all of the books that were "in my reading level" (which was like 6th grade to high school senior) (It was probably actually higher, but the tests wouldn't score me that high). I just got sick of reading for the program, and read for me. I devoured books in hours that were actually pretty deep and long. Reading for a grade bothered me. I'm not sure why, but it just did. There wasn't anything there that I thought should or could be graded.

I very rarely read (past tense) nonfiction, unless I had to find some source or other for some research project or something. There just were so many amazing, imaginary places I could go to that weren't my life or my world. (Not that my life was bad. My life was actually pretty awesome. Just not full of magic and lasers and cool spaceships.) 

Today, now, I still try to avoid nonfiction; it's mostly depressing. Math, on the other hand, (and yes, I do make that distinction) isn't depressing at all. It's challenging, sure. It makes you consider and wonder, absolutely. But it's really hard to depress someone with mathematics. (Yeah, you can show them figures and trends of society and such, but that's more statistics... which is another story altogether.) 

In math specifically, I was always kind of questioning what was shown me. I never just accepted something unless I'd run through several possible failed counter-examples. That, right there, is how you see what goes on behind the general statements teachers make, and the specifics of the problem you're currently working. 

I'm definitely planning on encouraging my students to look at the mathematics behind the world... to read it, you might say. There aren't a whole ton of trade-books about or explaining mathematics, but then, that's just old ground that people have crossed hundreds of times. Personal experimentation with numbers, with graphs, with all of the things you can consider in mathematics (read: EVERYTHING): That's how you learn mathematics. All the exercises are just a way to artificially inject that into students. But until you find something that students say to themselves, "I wanna learn more about THAT." "What makes THAT work that way?" "How come?" and then they look at it and decide for themselves that they can see what makes it work the way it does, to kind of prove it to themselves, THAT's what we're looking for.

Not everyone likes math. But everyone can do it, can have ideas about it. And I plan to tell my students that, every day if I have to. Just because you do or like math, that doesn't make you nerdy or lame or uncool. It makes you informed, and gives you a way to think about the world. And thinking about the world, while occasionally or frequently depressing, is how you make sense of what happens to you.