The other day, I went to Dylan’s open house at school and met his maths teacher. We went through the usual awkward self-introduction:

“So, who do you belong to?”

“Dylan”

“Oh! Dylan! He works so hard!”

“No! Dylan Lawrence!”

Apparently, Dylan’s teacher was under the misapprehension that Dylan works hard at maths. I tried to explain to her that maths was Dylan’s favourite subject because it required no work at all. She found the notion very odd. I thought it was obvious.

For me, at Dylan’s age, maths was my favourite subject too. It required no study or work and, every now and then, the teacher would give you some cool puzzles to work on. I would often slyly do maths in other classes when the teacher wasn’t looking. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to Dylan’s maths teacher that people would enjoy doing maths.

I have encountered this odd attitude before. When Dylan started fourth grade, at back to school night, his teacher explained how hard maths was for the children but that she had a bunch of manipulatives to help with the difficult concepts and she would take them through it step by step and, usually, by the end of the year they would understand.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have math teacher who enjoyed maths? I had english teachers that enjoyed their subject ..and history …and physics …and chemistry …and biology …and french …but never maths.

What if the default assumption in the maths class was that kids like maths and find it easy. What would that class be like?

Imagine if, at the start of the year, they said “OK. Everyone who loves maths come with me. We are going to teach you separately. Your teacher like maths too”. What would that class be like?

To their credit, Dylan’s school has advanced placement for maths and they give the new sixth graders a test. If they pass, they go into a class with a bunch of surly seventh graders who don’t like maths.

Anyway, Dylan just passed the test that lets him take high school maths next year. All he needs to do now is get the form signed and handed in on time which, apparently, was the hardest thing he had to do all year in maths class.

Why is it so hard for him to get a form signed? I don’t know where he gets it from.

Here’s a nice visualization of the federal budget:

 

Click on the picture for a fancy interactive version

That great big circle on the left is defense.

I haven’t blogged for a while and was scanning some of my old half-started blog entries when I came across this quote:

how amazing it is that the Mississippi River manages to meet every tributary, go under every bridge, past every boat ramp and past every fishing pole. Surely this couldn’t be random it must be the work of a divine intelligence.

I have no idea where it is from or why I wanted to quote it. But it’s pretty good nonetheless.

The New York Times just had a review of Natalie Angier’s The Canon. I expected the book to be good (despite the review) but I read a couple of chapters in Borders to see if it was worth buying and couldn’t get past what Pinker called “the distracting wordplay”. I think Angier has a quota of four puns and three metaphors per sentence.

Anyway, one of the better sections was on probability and she described the intriguing idea that, if you define a miracle as something that has less than a one in a million chance of happening, most people should experience a miracle once a month.

Speaking of books…just yesterday I was trying to think of books that I really enjoyed as a 12 year old that my soon-to-be-12-year-old might also enjoy and two really stood out in my memory. Both books  are both about teenagers which is probably why they made such an impression on me.

The first, The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, was the first book I ever read that was set in the USA and it made America seem so much more real - and different! - to me than the fantasy place in the movies. I just checked out the reviews on Amazon and they all say things like

I agree with the reviewers who believe that this book is one of the best books ever written for young adults.

I had no idea it was a famous book. There was a movie made of it (it was crap) but I have never heard of anyone else who had even read it. One detail that sticks in my mind is that the protagonist has a poster in his locker that asks

Do I dare disturb the universe?

which, as a 12 year old, moved me tremendously and is the theme for the whole book and often pops into my head when I have a difficult choice to make.

The other book, The Satanic Mill, is even more obscure. Imagine Harry Potter, set in a 17th century Bavarian forest, told by the Brothers Grimm. But take away all the non-dark bits. The reviewers at Amazon are unanimous in their opinion that it deserves 5 stars and it seems that everyone read it in foreign - in French, in Russian and the original German - except me.

I expected them both to be out of print so, imagine my delight when I came home from work today to find that my lovely wife had got The Chocolate War from the library for Dylan. What are the chances of that? I rushed to Amazon to look up The Satanic Mill and, sure enough, it was out of print but…the library has it! Copy’s on the way!

What are the chances that either book is as good as my 30 year old memory of it?