New Lego Building

Inspired by my visit to the Lego exhibition at the National Building Museum, this is my latest creation. It's to scale of the Lego architecture model series, and it's a work in progress.

And while working on this Lego building, I've been really amazed by all of the math that I'm using in the process. And I LOVE IT! I really love math...and I'm pretty damn good at it in a comprehensive sort of way. It's taken me decades to discover this about myself. And with each revelation, I've become a better math teacher and coach to the students who've been my gift to teach over the years.

So why? Why has it been such a struggle for me in the past 2 score years? In a way, it was a teacher. His name was Mr. McMahon. He was the advanced math teacher at my little High School in southeastern Michigan. He was the only game in town. We were his minions, and he delighted in belittling us--his way of motivating us. He was a genial, wacky-professor sort of Math teacher one moment and the arbiter of our math future the next. I'm sure he thought that his being tough meant that he had high standards, but his behavior only rewarded those whose natural abilities made math come easy to them in the first place, he wasn't so much a teacher as a judge. He never taught us how to understand math, he only provided a context by which he could identify the gifted and put the rest of us in our place.

His approach to education has done one thing for me. Inspired me to be "the wind at my students' backs, not the spit in the faces." I'm told it sounds better in Spanish!