Fun

If you live in Australia, school has restarted after the Easter vacation. Well, it has in some states. In others, you have another week. Yay! That means another week of fun. Not that school isn’t fun.

Really? School? Fun? You can think of a million reasons why it isn’t. And there are plenty of us who could give a million reasons why it is fun. Without talking it up too much, learning is a fun experience. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll recall that happy brains learn things better than sad or angry ones.

The best part is, you can’t feel learning happening. And that's a good thing. Because one day, your learning will help you. That math you struggle with now? It's not just numbers on a page. It's a tool that will pay off when you need it in real life.

Here’s a thought–math is part of everything we do. Every aspect of our daily lives has math in it somewhere. I used to challenge students in my classes to find something that didn’t have math in it. The more they explored, the more fun they had.

On one level, they were trying to beat their teacher by finding something he didn’t know. On a deeper level (oops, deep thinking again), exploring everyday things to find the math behind them was … fun.

Okay, here’s the challenge: find something that doesn’t have math in it. Here is one example that has been tried. It didn’t work:

Where’s the math in reading?

Hmm, how many pages are in the book? How long did you read for today? Both questions will have a number in the answer.

Go ahead and see if you can beat the challenge. Have fun!