balance

Yes, You Can Love Books TOO Much

Heresy, you say?

Hear me out before you brand me a traitor to writer-kind.

With a lot of kids, I’m thrilled when they want to read something that’s not required by a teacher. At my last school, we had a small amount of dedicated reading time every day, regardless of what class they were in at that time. Sometimes I had a class of reluctant readers, and any time they didn’t put they books away the second reading time ended, I didn’t mind letting them carry on a bit.

There are kids at the other end of the spectrum, though. Kids who always want to read. Some of them know how to prioritize. They pay attention to lessons, work hard to get their tasks done so they’ll have a bit of free time to read at the end of class.

That’s fine by me.

But some kids don’t have that self-control. Some will read straight through class unless someone steps in and stops them.

That someone would be me. The big, mean, book-closing teacher.

Forgive me, my fellow bibliophiles, but kids need more than books … they need math, too. Among other things.

Any suggestions on helping certain students see that need for balance?

Speak up:

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Covering the Full Spectrum

I seem to talk about balance a lot. (I just ran a search on “balance” and it came up with a dozen posts here on the blog.) It certainly comes up plenty when talking about writing. Balance description with pace. Balance clarity with mystery and intrigue. Adjectives aren’t evil; the overuse and abuse of them is.

Basically, I don’t go in for absolutes on a lot of things. It’s not just in writing, either. It holds in other areas, even when I make a statement that might seem absolute. For instance, I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise:

But does this mean I love math absolutely? That I love all math? That I love every single thing pertaining to math?

Nope.

There are parts I love more, parts I love less, and parts I love not at all. Like what, you ask? Here you go—examples.

Math-Thing I Love a Lot: Being able to break down a complex problem into steps or pieces that logically flow from one to another.

Math-Thing I Love Less: Sketching visuals (graphs, diagrams, etc.) by hand. I can do them pretty well on paper, but I’m a teacher. That means whiteboards. And that means, uh, not so pretty. (Favorite math quote of all-time: “Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrect drawing.”)

Math-Thing I Don’t Love At All: Having to do things the long way when I know there’s a shortcut. That might be more of a math teacher thing, but it came up sometimes when I was a student, too. If a student can prove to me they understand the foundations contained in the long way and can justify their shortcut working consistently, I’ll usually let them use it. But as the teacher, I’m generally stuck with the long way in the early days of teaching a concept.

But here’s the good news about having such a full spectrum even within something I love. I suspect it means even students who generally hate math will have some aspect of it they don’t hate. My job is to find that aspect, because that’s where I can get my foot in the door.

How about you? If you love math, what part of it do you hate? If you hate math, what part of it do you love?

Speak up:

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