Figures

 Over the last week I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. This wasn't a political vortex or a path down nostalgia lane. This was all about numbers. 

I have written here before about my love for teaching math. This came as a bit of a surprise since most of my enthusiasm for mathematics was knocked out of me by an ill-tempered high school instructor of elementary functions. He was not a fan of my approach to my senior year, which included a predilection toward the class clown end of the spectrum. But that didn't mean I didn't care about the math. This did not register on his end and he gave me the option of dropping his class before he failed me for my attitude. 

I dropped the class. 

And it was almost twenty years before I found my way back to math. 

Helping kids find patterns and connections in numbers and shapes and strands is fun for me. Watching them piece together the world around them through mathematics is a joy. This also gives me a chance to extend my own appreciation for figures and calculation. This past week had me sharing with fourth graders the fact that the product of any two even numbers is an even number, and the product of any two odd numbers is an odd number, but the product of an odd and an even number is always an even number. Which was intriguing enough for them, but after I was done with the class, I found myself wondering why there weren't more even numbers than odd if that was the case. I brought this dilemma home to my wife, and made my conjecture that this might have something to do with prime numbers. Together we imagined a sea of numbers and pictured the products of even numbers lighting up, then odd numbers in another color, then prime numbers in yet another. 

Later I turned to Reddit, where I found a thread of folks who had similar cogitations. I felt validated for having this somewhat vague quandary. And pleased that there was still some mystery left for me in arithmetic. Forty plus years after being kicked out of Elementary Functions, I was still thinking math thoughts. 

It felt good.