He might as well have worn a .45 on either hip

I was so excited last night that I could hardly sit still thinking about it, anticipating my first teaching experience with math since completing my undergraduate math degree. I love teaching math. This time, it was only for a five-minute microteaching exercise, but still! Since I only had five minutes at my disposal, I taught them the story about Andrew Jackson that helps you memorize the first fifteen digits of the decimal representation of e. (You know: e.*) I was relieved that they actually got into it and enjoyed the storytelling aspect of the lesson-ette. I am not, ultimately, very good at math--that's why I'm in grad school for medieval studies, not mathematics--but I will never understand how people can see it as dry. So, I guess I'm pleased that one girl said that it was nice to have someone take as dry a topic as you can get and make it exciting, but it's still a little sad. And yet, that's part of what I love about teaching math, knowing that I can actually be useful in that particular way. What a shamefully self-centred reason that is for loving something, but I do love it. About a month or so back, I said to my supervisor, "I can't tell you how excited I am to be teaching math again," to which he retorted, "Don't tell me!" I guess I should get that dissertation finished up instead.

But don't imagine that I'm going to let math escape from my medievalism.


*I actually think that Wikipedia's article is better at breaking up and arranging the material for people to look at, although I do not claim to have checked their stuff. Should this be an embarrassing admission? I suspect that more and more of what appears on Wikipedia is pretty well vetted by relatively expert people, though I still caution my students against citing internet sources where no authority can be verified and no identifiable individual or institution will take credit for the content.

EDIT: I wonder if part of people's aversion to math, even when it is expressed in terms of yawn magnitudes, might not be related to the fear and sense of inferiority that is so prevalent. How often do we simply need to feel a sense of competence before we can register interest? Or how often do we take refuge in accusations of "boring!" when we feel inadequate? These are sobering questions to direct at myself.