![]() ![]() ![]() Outside of school, I remember playing a game in each new playground, where I would try to do every part of the play equipment exactly once without crossing my path. In fact, thinking carefully about what is around me in these memories, I seem to be in a hall or a library, rather than in a classroom. I also remember loving playing with polydrons and attribute tiles, but again the memory is just about the fascination of playing with them, and not about any particular maths class. Interestingly, my memory is only of the blocks themselves and I can’t pinpoint a year level or a teacher that goes with this. I remember absolutely loving the MAB blocks, in particular the moment when I replaced ten units with a long, and ten longs with a flat and ten flats with a block. ![]() Eight-year-old me was an astute little person.Īcross my primary school career, I do remember a strong feeling of pleasure and fascination associated with construction toys. I was angry because how could I possibly know that? Everything else was just logic and so I could figure it out for myself, but you can’t figure out the meaning of a word without more context. I distinctly remember it being a multiple choice question and ruling out two of the answers as ridiculous, but basically having to guess between the other two. The only thing I got wrong was the meaning of the word “net” in the phrase “net weight” as you might see listed on a packet of food. I dutifully did the test and actually got almost full marks. I had been sick with asthma for a couple of weeks and came back to school on the day of a test. The only other maths class memory is of a test I did in Year 3. ![]() Another was my memory of my Year 6 teacher attempting to teach us averages using cricket. One was my memory of doing a maths assignment about one million dollars, where the financial aspect distressed me to tears. I’ve related two of them already in this blog. In primary school, I have very few memories of actually being in a maths class, and all of them are negative. In the spirit of those two, here are some of my earliest memories about maths and play. In Stuart Brown’s “ Play“, he urged me to think about my play history to see what influenced my current feelings and tendencies about play. In Tracy Zager’s “ Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had“, she urged me to think about my maths autobiography to see what influenced my current feelings about maths. Memory’s a weird thing.Two books I’ve read recently have encouraged me to investigate my memories from childhood. If that’s the case, then what I’m remembering is actually a mental image that I would have conjured when they told me the story, and not the event itself. But it’s also quite possible this memory is apocryphal, implanted a year or two later when my parents recounted for me the occasion of my first word. My parents have told me that this actually happened and that in fact it’s when I said my first word: After I touched the light, my father said “hot,” and I repeated, “ott.” If it’s true that I remember it, that’s a very early memory-I think I was less than a year old. I seem to remember being in my father’s arms in line in a crowded office and reaching up to touch an overhead light and scalding myself. When is your first memory from? Were your parents “highly elaborative” storytellers? (“Verifiable,” of course, is a loose term.) One Slatester swore he had a memory from before his first birthday another remembers nothing before age 6. To accompany Nicholas Day’s article about childhood memories, we asked Slate staffers about their earliest verifiable memory. ![]()
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