Blogging for Work

I have had several ideas for my next post floating and solidifying, floating and solidifying in my head for the last week.  I've even taken notes down so I remember my scattered thoughts.

To no avail!! I have been so busy with that thing called life that I haven't had a clear-headed moment to sit and write.

But, I did have the opportunity to sit and work on a blog for work today.

So, I thought I would share that with you below.

"Why Math is Cool"

Recently, I had a conversation with one of our math tutors, Alex, about the interconnectedness of subjects. 

I have taken on a personal project to study in depth the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment periods of history.  My students learn about these eras to varying degrees and depths in all of the history and government subjects I tutor, and part of what I like about tutoring history is discussing context.  To that end, I have decided to explore the details surrounding these particular eras of history because they are responsible for a plethora of revolutions, movements, new ways of thinking, and education systems. 

What an incredible opportunity to connect for a student the Enlightenment movement in the 1600s to the reason we promote liberal education today, essentially, the reason this particular student in front of me has the right, the obligation, to attend a school wherein she learns a little bit about all the subjects she can possibly imagine, for free.

So there we sat, Nichole, our Spanish tutor, Alex, and me. 

“I love that in our Humanities program I get to help kids think critically, think about ways of understanding things, ways of thinking, and not just address basic skills or answers,” I said.

“Well but I’m sure that those same opportunities are not as often available in, say, Math,” Nichole responded, motioning to Alex.

“On the contrary,” He said, “It is so much more important for me to teach my students how to find their own answers, how to think about math in an abstract way, why math matters, than it is for me to teach them equations.  If I can give them the tools to first think about the problem in different ways, then I can help them think about how they might go about finding their own answers to those problems.  Unlike most other subjects, math is derided by many students as unnecessary to the real world.  It’s the one area about which students always ask, ‘when will I ever use this?’”

I remembered then having a similar discussion with a tutor from our Berkeley center who has since left us, Jennifer.  I asked her, after hearing yet another student complain yet again that geometry is useless for the real world since said student had no intention of going into architecture.  I knew I was putting Jennifer on the spot, but, like a lawyer in the courtroom who knows to ask only questions in open court she already knows the answer to, I also knew Jennifer could hold her own.

“How about when you need to parallel park?  How about when you think about fitting all of your items in a bag?  How about when you load your car?  When you go rock climbing and need to make the next precarious move?  All of these things are spatial concerns.  Geometry helps you think about spatial relationships.” 

Yea, she’s pretty brilliant. 

I relayed this conversation to Alex and Nichole, and Alex exclaimed, “exactly!”

You know those moments, when you’re having a really good conversation, you feel like everybody is on the same page, and everyone just “gets” everyone else?  This was like that. 

“Math is about relationships, spatial and otherwise.  Ways of understanding the world, making connections, from addition and subtraction to geometry and even physics,” he said.

“Right,” I nodded, “Math will help my daughter think about the planets someday.  Because she understands basic geometry, she will be able to imagine herself on this sphere, earth, and imagine the planets around us.  Without math we cannot see the world in all its wonder.”

I described the current book I am listening to for my Scientific Revolution project, called The Jewel House, by Deborah Harkness, about the birth of the Revolution on the streets of Elizabethan London.  In this book, math, mathematical function, and thinking mathematically, are new and exciting phenomena in the world.  Harkness describes the interactions between Queen Elizabeth and the everyday members of society who are trying to get letters of patent to practice teaching math, to sell books about math, to create and sell mathematical instruments.  People at all levels of society are coming to realize how crucial math is to life, both personally and in business.

At this point, Alex jumped up and ran out of the break room only to come running back in with a book in his hand. 

This book that he had apparently been carrying around in his backpack and reading at his leisure is made up of different math stories, points in history when math has played a crucial role. 

“So this particular story,” he explains flipping through the pages to find the right chapter, “is about the adoption of the Arabic number system in Elizabethan London.”  Apparently, the author makes the point that Shakespeare waxes philosophic on the zero several times in his writings.  “This author asks us to imagine what it must have been like.  For Shakespeare’s father, basic math involved X as 10, V as 5, i as 1.  Imagine trying to do math with those symbols.  And what a revelation, what a wonder, to be able to simply line numbers up and multiply, divide, add, subtract.  The beauty of simplicity.”

The beauty of information, of knowledge.  The beauty of curiosity, of a joy of learning. 

I tutor Shakespeare.  My students and I pick apart lines, we examine words, we search for meaning, but many of the conversations we have are about why this matters now.  Why should I care about Julius Caesar?  Othello?

Alex tutors math.  He helps students start from zero and understand its relationship to the vast infinity of numbers beyond.  But he also shows them why that infinity matters.  And why the relationships within infinity are important.  Why math is cool.

At the Bay Area Tutoring Center, yes, we tutor most high school subjects, we help you get through an upcoming test, we support the learning you’re experiencing at school.

But at our best, and in my not so humble opinion our best is, if not constant, consistent, we are excited, and we get our students, if not excited, engaged.  Because we are engaged.  As Alex, Nichole, and I sat that day discussing interconnectedness we found a new connection among our subjects.  Why?  Because we live and breathe our subjects; we are curious, and we enjoy creating and feeding curiosity.

The beauty of curiosity.

The Most Successful Failures: Potty Training and Christopher Columbus

As a history tutor, I often think of ways to make history exciting.  Not just interesting, funny.  Not just informative, outrageous.  And so, I love to tell the story of Henry VIII.  Scandal!  Divorce.  Execution. Betrayal.
"And then, imagine, he finally gets the son he has moved mountains for, his heir, his dream, and the kid is sickly from birth, and dies shortly after taking the throne, before going through puberty!"
"Karma," one of my students said.
Gotcha!
And they're with me.  Involved in the story, engaged.

Because I think about history so much, and ways of telling these stories, I also often try to relate tales from hundreds of years ago to today.  If I'm really lucky, I can weave in lessons that kids need to learn in general, like overcoming failure.
Christopher Columbus is my favorite story in terms of failure.  The man was an ambitious sailor who was anxious to find a path, by sea, around the horn of Africa, over to India, so as to avoid the drama involved in crossing through the Ottoman empire.
At this point, I pull out the map, reveal to my students what the land journey would involve, and point out what he was trying to do by sea, when, whoops, (their eyes follow my finger as I slide it across the vast blue Atlantic) he lands in the Caribbean, ahem, excuse me, "West Indies."
The most successful failure of all time.
He failed to find India.  Vasco da Gama did that a few years later.
But what a success for Europe, his "discovery" of the New World. (Obviously not so much for the Native Americans.)
Riches beyond riches piled upon riches.  (Not to mention death, destruction, and dysentery.)

In any event, I get to turn this piece of history into a lesson on both revisionist history and the incredible success to be found in failure.  And they get it.  We have wonderful conversations about evil and good, about learning from mistakes or forging on blind with cognitive dissonance.

And this last week, I got served my own healthy portion of successful failure.

My toddler potty trained by accident.

Yes, you read that right.  By accident.

I had very few supplies:  a potty we bought months ago that has been used as a stool and a storage container by my daughter, and a half dozen pull ups and two pairs of training underwear handed down by my niece.
Horribly armed thusly last week, I watched as Celaya was running around naked and rushed to me, urgently, "mama, put a diaper on me!"

Ding!  I thought.  Serendipity!

"Go on your potty, honey, it's right there."

She did.  Well, she sat on her potty.  And played.  For thirty minutes.

"Honey, if you don't have to go, you don't have to sit there.  You can run around.  Just let me know when you have to go."

What followed was three hours of this exact scenario repeated.  Her asking for a diaper, me urging her to sit on her potty, her playing on it, eventually getting up, and repeating it all over again.  Finally, she broke down in tears (I had been filling her up with water the entire time, so I'm sure her bladder was quite full).  She sat and cried for a good ten minutes before she couldn't hold it any longer.

"Oh!  Oh look!"  She said, sincerely pleased with herself.  And truly as if she had done this all on her own with none of the preceding drama.  That was a week ago.  With the exception of one really bad day because of some too embarrassing to repeat parenting mistakes, she has taken to potty training like a pro.  In public, outside, at home, with me, my husband, and my brother, my not even three year old behaves incredibly maturely about a process that to me has seemed highly charged emotionally.

A successful failure.  I do feel like I failed her in so many ways this last week.  I should have been prepared.  I should have just let her put a diaper on that day.  I shouldn't have threatened to kill my husband when he handled it differently than I would have.  (Yea, that really happened.)  But we rode the waves, we battened down the hatches, and we, for the most part, let the ocean guide us in the direction she chose, toward her success.

And she is turning out to be one of the most intuitive little oceans I've ever heard of.

And I'm a history tutor.