this comment length diary is about grass. I have come to accept the idea of mowing one's front yard. In the interest of community pride you want your house to not stick out and be some sort of nuisance. But what about the back lawn? I have always enjoyed wild open spaces and unfurrowed fields and such, so when it comes to my back yard, I always hesitate. Its not laziness, i just like the way it looks. I think of the many birds and other critters, (ewww other critters) that use the grasses as a home, place to breed and feed. That unsightly patch of weeds is my own little nature preserve. But within my own little nano-serengetti I am told there could be lurking ticks and slugs and other creepies and crawlies, therefore it has got to go. I wish I had buffalo, horses or even a goat to maintain a balance, but instead I must let my little Honda noisily chew up a winters worth of grass, carbon be damned. So before I go attach myself to the back end of that beast I need to take a moment to thank someone.
I work at a school on a reservation we don't have much money. Math is not really a part of the culture, fishing is, hunting is, gathering is, dancing and drumming is, sharing is; a qualitative not quantitative worldview is the result. Now if you take the time to teach our students math, they learn just like anyone. But what is lacking is the home element, many students may be their family's first generation to become educated. Sure their parents went to school for a while, many did not finish. Few went on to college, many just got into debt as a result. Hooking these kids up with good sound scholarship advice, for me is one of my favorite ways to "fuck the system" back.
This week we received a brand new graphing calculator a TI-84, donated by a kind someone responding to one of my diaries. Thank you, I had to take a walk and cry like a little girl with a skinned knee for a few minutes just knowing there are people that still do this sort of thing.
When your goal is to get kids ready for and interested in calculus, the idea is to sell higher math to kids as some sort of comic-book superpower that they can get too, just by understanding numbers. I like to show a few advanced "tricks" to keep them interested. Learning to use a calculator and computer are a big part of this.
I might reply some, and add later but really I am off to deal with my own little great outdoors, maybe I'll make a word problem out of it.