Every morning, when I wake up, one of the first things I say to myself is, “Try to find genius in the simple today.”
Some of the most difficult work of a teacher is in taking a complex concept and breaking it down into it’s simplest parts.
I learned as a young parent that children are better at doing this than I am.
When Bakary was a pre-schooler, we were kicking a soccer ball back and forth to each other in the back yard.
He surprised himself (and me) by kicking the ball so hard and so high with his little foot that it sailed over the fence into our neighbors yard and spun backwards against that fence on their side.
“Hmmm,” I wondered aloud to him. “How are we going to get the ball back? I could lift you over the fence, you could get the ball, and I could lift you back over the fence. But there are barns along the top of the fence and I’m afraid it might hurt one of us. Or we could go through the gate of the fence and get the ball, but the gate has a lock on it. Or we could knock on the neighbors door and ask him to get the ball for us, but nobody’s home at their house. Hmmm, what can we do?”
As I finished my wondering, I noticed that Bakary was bringing the ball up and over the fence back into our yard. He had simply put his little hands through the chain links and lifted the ball one hands length at a time until he got the ball back.
Simple.
I didn’t see it until he had done it, until he was dribbling the soccer ball with his feet to his spot once again so we could continue our game of kick.
Today my students and I were working on the area model as a strategy to solve division problems with big numbers.
I was looking at the problem, 240/6 and thinking aloud about how to break down the dividend into a number that the divisor could easily devise.
One of my students, who didn’t meet his math standard on his SC Ready test last year, simply said, “Well, 6 x 4 is 24 so the answer is 40.
He knows his basic facts.
He saw was genius in the simple for me during my afternoon math block.
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