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What do you do as a teacher when the temperature is a muggy 90 degrees outside and your lethargic students have just eaten lunch?
I peruse my room. Students are slumped over their desks barely able to stay awake. My carefully planned lesson seems strangely alien in this atmosphere of reluctance. The vision of students struggling enthusiastically to solve challenging problems is fading as I take in the panorama of sleepy minds and bodies in front of me.
An overwhelming wave of futility washes over me. I gaze around the room desperately looking for a natural opening. Unfortunately, there is a force field of inertia so thick that, I feel like I am talking through wet cement. My words fall on deaf ears and wooden desks.
I stop and wait quietly. Several students prop open one eye to make sure I am still there. My natural opening just arose.
Gently, ever so gently, I state: “Today is our last Wednesday together and it is NOT a coincidence that we should be doing THIS question on the board.” Three or four heads pop up and stare vacantly at the question. There is more silence, until one student mumbles, “What’s the coincidence?” His jet black eyes are hidden under long bangs. “Aah” I think, “he’s awake!”
Two more heads pop up like prairie dogs looking for predators. I answer quietly and slowly: “I haven’t worked that part out yet”?
More voices contribute unexpectedly throwing out unlikely conjectures. “Well one co-ordinate has a 3 and Wednesday is the third day of the week!” says one student at the back of the room, beaming with satisfaction. Another chimes in that “the combination of co-ordinates (3,6) adds to 9 which is the number of letters in Wednesday”.
Suddenly over half the bodies in the hot, muggy, depressive room are awake and squawking like chicks in a nest. “Where is this enthusiasm coming from?” I wonder.
Raising my voice I ask “Do you realize how lucky you are to have a classroom? In some countries, students walk 10 miles to school to stand or sit under a tree. No books, no shelter, and a long walk home.” There is a stirring. I feel like a preacher on a pulpit as I rhetorically declare and ask “Do you realize less than two percent of the entire planet’s population know what a Cartesian Number Plane is and even fewer understand how to create graphs?” Heads are popping up curiously.
“Do you know?”
There is a growing curiosity in the air.
“Who among you dares to fight this malady of inertia and answer the question on the board?” I challenge.
Unexpectedly a student blurts out the correct answer. We are making progress. “There is still time” I think to myself, “we will get through this”.
“Do you realize this math is only 300 years old?” I ask in an excited tone. “Hurrr?” mumbles someone. “Yes!” I claim exuberantly. “Descartes thought this out while he was eating eggs at a restaurant in Paris. He wrote it down on his napkin! Can you imagine how his waitress responded?”
More students are stirring. One blurts out “I thought the Mayans already knew this?” I was reaching them now. I had them! “No” I said delightedly at his wonderful guess, ” the Mayans invented zero! But” I paused, “Descartes needed their zero to build his number plane. So you are right, in part. The Mayans contributed something,” I pause for dramatic effect, then punch out the all important words “the origin!”
With the Mayans and Descartes at my side I am riding the wave of interest and learning with my students. We complete the problem with relish.
“This is why our last Wednesday together is no coincidence. We accomplished our task together, just like we have on every other Wednesday! Terrific job, ladies and gentlemen”.
The bell swallows up the word gentlemen as it leaves my lips. The students are alive with that peculiar energy that appears from nowhere at the end of every period.
I ponder the lesson’s aftermath in my hot, muggy room, wondering “What are the special ingredients that make it possible for students and the teacher to mysteriously come together?”
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