Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that many students secretly love doing math work. This is exciting. I can’t say, “Everybody loves doing math work” because that would imply 100% of the students love doing math work. It is very difficult to account for 100% of anything, let alone everybody, but there is a lot of evidence to support my stance.
Let me explain:
If you like doing something, you’ll spend time doing it. The more you like it, the more you’ll make it a priority. For instance, if you like playing video games, you’ll often trade sleep for the experience of saving the princess or ridding the planet of aliens. If you like inequalities, you’ll write them on the back of your hand ( 1<3 …). As a side note, these inequalities usually express a commitment to a unit rate of humans. For example: 1<3 Clarence. Also interesting is that what follows the <3 should, according to proper English, be plural but seldom is. Of course, some people prefer 1<3 ?, which as far as plurality goes, is ambiguous. This has been an interesting tangent, but now back to our regularly scheduled program…
If spending time doing something = fun then a lot of students enjoy some things that are a bit puzzling to me. For instance, some students enjoy being yelled at by their parents. These students must enjoy it because they invest time in being yelled at. They know their parents will nag them to do something that they are required to do on a regular basis. They don’t do what their parents ask them to do the first time, or the second, or the third, or the nth time (when n>3). What most of these students don’t realize is that each time their parents nag them it takes more of the student’s personal time that could be spent on video games or inequalities (or getting better at pencil tapping by practicing to YouTube videos). Since it’s taking up their time, and they could have made a choice to not be nagged by doing what they knew needed done in the first place, these students must view being nagged as fun.
Now this is bizarre behavior, but it’s not as strange as those students who secretly love math. On the surface these students may say, “I hate math”, but deep down their actions show otherwise. They could save a bundle of time if they used a bit of common sense, but they’re having fun doing (and redoing) things the hard way.
I hear the question now, “Mathman, what in the 2nd prime numbered planet from the sun do you mean?”
A: These students think that they’re taking the easy way out by saying: “I did it in my head” or “I did it on my calculator” or “I used another piece of scratch paper, but my little sister feels the need for more fiber in her diet so she ate it.” What he (used as the indefinite pronoun) doesn’t realize is that, in the end, math teachers are a stubborn lot and WILL require him to “Show your work” or “Explain your answer”. So the person who answered “IDK”, “?”, or “ITL” will, in fact, be spending more time on the problem then necessary. He could have put the effort into solving the problem correctly the first time, but instead chose the path that required not just solving the problem, but the path of extra writing by putting down the wrong answer in the first place. What’s the clincher in the whole deal though is that he also must like being nagged by his math teacher. Why? The student could have saved time by reading the directions and solving the problem correctly in the first place. Instead he chose to have the math teacher tell him to do it again (and again, and again, …).
Some people sure have strange ideas of what constitutes fun.
Maybe we need shirts:
1 <3 Math.
Or
1<3 Redoing things that I could have done right the first time.
Stay radical.