welikesnow

“ To some students, getting cues from the teacher rather than thinking about the math has become such an ingrained habit that it is their entire modus operandi when doing math with an expert around (teacher, tutor, parent, peer, etc.). They usually have lost faith in their ability to have math actually make sense to them, and this cueing has become their sole survival strategy. They regularly fail tests and have come to accept this, but they would rather fake you out than admit ignorance – understandable, since they often carry a feeling of stupidity arising from their lost faith, and admitting ignorance would mean exposing this supposed stupidity. So they watch you and produce the right answers more often than not. Not with any sense of trickery or getting over on anyone – often, they’re barely conscious of the game. But it’s how they survive. ”

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I want to say a word about hope here.

I want to say a word about how the most important thing is just to show up, to have faith, to be present, to fuck up and know it and still love yourself completely, and show up the next day, still with faith and a willingness to be present, to really see what is happening in this moment, now.

I want to say a word about how a person can spend 4 years teaching and feeling incompetent and frustrated and like it doesn’t matter, and then out of the blue, for relatively unimportant reasons, ten kids that you taught when you were just starting, tell you without hesitation or qualification how you changed their lives, and then go back to talking about pizza and what they’re going to do after school.

I want to say a word about the importance of uncomplicated friendship that rejuvenates and inspires, clarifies, answers, supports.

I want to say a word about gratitude. To be able to notice any of this is the whole point, I think.

We are revolutionaries, all of us, each of us doing the best we can, loving and hoping and serving every day, even the ones that feel like a total sham. Eat it. Enjoy it. Live it. Trust it. Take it. It’s yours.

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“ This is a short little book— 176 pages total— built around the idea of Fermi Problems, the order-of-magnitude estimates that Enrico Fermi was famous for. The idea is that, with a little basic knowledge and some really simple math, you can come up with ballpark estimates of all sorts of things— the canonical Fermi problem example is “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? ”