February 18, 2007
During the past seven days I have been very busy attending to many details surrounding the loss of our septic system, causing me to consider that perhaps building an emergency outhouse and washing clothes in the creek was in store for us. That thought occurred to me while at the Laundromat yesterday with multiple washers and dryers serving me, while I shivered without any heat in the building for three hours. The dryers did nothing to warm it up so I stood outside for a while and thought about the likelihood of returning in a few days to do the laundry again since cold weather remains on the horizon. Reminisced about waiting for the school bus as a child in cold temperatures. Overall I have been enjoying the Yankee weather and the ice puddles in my yard. I am not enjoying the loss of toilets, running water, dishwashing, and the washing machine.
The other thing taking up more attention than usual is our math lessons. Recently I was inspired to teach math in a dual way – to continue with curriculum but to add a missing part. This inspiration came from a young man who recently shared with us how math professors at the university level really only serve themselves and the university with their math efforts. He talked of math being applicable, practical, and interesting on a day to day basis. As I pondered his thoughts at a later time (much larger thoughts than I just related to you), I realized that other subjects such as English and history I had taken a dual approach – #1 the facts and #2 the real life getting your hands dirty with it – but with math I had relied on just trying to get through the curriculum. This is due to the fact that I have never really liked math. When I look back over my school days, my math teachers were bored themselves so I was bored and did the minimum to get the grade. It seems in our society we don’t really use math that much anymore – everything is instantly done for us.
The question became …. how to become an enthusiastic, creative, and thinking math mom. Knowing that I am far deficient, I rallied up some help. On Tuesdays, we are using our eyes and brains to arrange things the smartest way we can figure out … when counting. This we are achieving through the Grapes of Math book, which has colorful things to count in large picture format, with poetry to match the creative count. I like the poetry, the kids like the counting. When we are through with the book, we will have to find ways to apply it to marbles or something else we toss across the floor. On Wednesdays, I am reading from Mathematicians are Real People Too. So far we have had stories about Pythagoras and Thales. I have had the children guess how they solved certain problems before reading the account. No one could figure out the answers. Why? Because we do not observe well. So observation must be our friend. This requires the skill of attention. That’s when it dawned on me … not one of us is that attentive. Character skills and math????? Oh, no!!!
On Thursdays, Penrose the Cat arrives to purr us into a math mentality. Last week was the 0s and 1s and base two. With a little help from my husband, we not only learned about base two, but it was applied to computers, light bulbs, curling irons, electricity, voltage, batteries and bombs. Yes, bombs. Today we did square roots and irrational numbers, which are, err, irrational. They can’t be made into fractions? Still working on those. Made several calls to my husband this morning about this irrational stuff. Still don’t get it all but I do like the story of the cat as he is a real cat that lives with the mathematician who wrote the book. I also kept thinking about numbers and it bugs me that some numbers never resolve themselves. You know, 1.34892837489… It’s the dot, dot, dot that just plagues me. How can they be real numbers if they don’t have an end? What if there is a repeating, endless pattern to what comes after the dot? To a musician, not resolving something is, well, uh, sin. All good musical compositions depend on accurate and aesthetic resolution of harmony and melody, put in time with rhythm. Hmmm. That poses a dilemma. Math is also accurate. Can math also be aesthetic? This is getting scary.
Fridays, perhaps the best day of all, I have assigned to the best and most familiar chocolate to me from days back home – Hershey’s. A Hershey bar actually snuck its way into our math lesson two weeks ago. Before we could unwrap it, we noted how the wrapper was measured, examined the data on the wrapper in the form of calories – grams – percentages of the daily diet (a math/science lesson in itself), and brainstormed how inventory is done for chocolate bars in the grocery store how to stock a store, and how to price such a candy bar for the benefit of the maker and distributor and still get the consumer to purchase it. We finally unwrapped the chocolate bar, but showed great restraint in eating it. There were 16 sections, conveniently divided into eight portions for 7 children and 1 math-hopeful mom. You know, 7 + 1 = 8. We counted the 16 several ways, discussed how to find out grams per portion, and finally when exhausted with the math end of it, gobbled it up. Since then, two packs of Kissables, another Hershey’s product, have snuck their way into math. Again, mathematical attention was applied to their wrappers, except this time we estimated how many kisses were in each bag. How would that relate to the weight? Did a certain number of kisses equal the weight? We won’t tell – it’s our secret. We did divide each bag into the colors found therein, and then bar graphed the results, showing that there were very different amounts of red, blue, green, etc. in each bag. The reward? Approximately 10 kisses per person. Approximately might be a good mathematical term, but to the person who gets less, this is a character bender. I again was aghast. Character and math? Sounds like a plague. This is truly math “sealed with a kiss.” Since that time, Hershey’s Reeses Peanut Butter Cups also arrived. Now how to take Hershey’s Almond Joy Bars and add some coconut to it all. (You know the old commercial: “Sometimes you feel like a nut.” I always feel like one.)
Do these mathematical endeavors translate into real life? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, this week I bear testimony. Instead of attacking the septic problems in the usual manner, I have creatively counted toilet overflows, estimated how many towels it takes to clean one up one overflow that I don’t have a washer to wash, divided three toilets into possible overflow numbers, determined how many children can bathe in one tubful of water at five minutes each to keep the water hot, calculated how many trips in the cold to the Laundromat it will take to get through six work days per week, worked through which machine and its cost in quarters is the most economical, contemplated if there would be a smarter mathematical arrangement of washers and dryers in the Laundromat to generate more space and therefore income but decided that I would rather just paint the walls a different color, calculated how long it will take me to replenish my quarter fund, and so forth.
As to my kids, they have just divided a bag of Hershey’s valentine kisses in red and white and ate them with one small problem. Some were fed to the dog, and chocolate can kill dogs. Well, I’m off to be homeschool vet mom and check it out.
