Number Game
I start every weekday driving my 5-year-old son to school. He loves math, and on the way to kindergarten he’ll often ask if we can play a “number game” – little word problems with some silliness thrown in (if you had seven strawberry-frosted donuts and each of your sisters takes three when you aren’t looking . . . .). He loves it because it’s challenging, because it’s a puzzle, because it’s play, and because it’s something we get to do together. I hope he always feels that way.
I visited a calculus 2 class here at BUA yesterday, and I was so heartened to see the same spark in these kids. I observed this group of about a dozen 10th to 12th graders for twenty minutes, and the whole time they were working on a single problem in small groups. The teacher shared with me that the problem was both conceptually tricky and algebraically diabolical. Kids were huddled together trying to untangle the knots the problem offered. The room was boisterous – comic groans when they hit roadblocks, celebrations when they worked something through. Now and then, a student from one group would get up and walk over to another to compare notes. The teacher was walking around giving pointers – not answers. At one point he said, “I have heard four answers so far, and no two are the same!” The kids laughed and kept at it. I talked to one of those students in the hallway today and asked if they figured it out. She beamed when she told me that they did.
It breaks my heart that as kids get older, so many of them lose that playfulness and joy in math, which is too often replaced by either grudging acceptance or even a fixed-mindset phobia: “I’m just not good at math.” We owe them better. Our teachers work hard to create environments where we can play with math – providing real challenge alongside loving support. I’m so glad this is a place where kids still get to play “number games.”