I remember immediately wondering about how the various straight and curved pieces might fit together. Some of them were on the floor being made into a car track by some other children. Here in the play area was a bookcase filled with big thick brown blocks. We walked into a carpeted play area, and the desks and blackboard were some distance away at the other end of the classroom. It’s the moment I walked into my kindergarten classroom for the first time.
Indeed, my very first memory of primary school is about geometrical play. It seems that for me, geometrical play holds the strongest positive mathematical memories from my primary school years. Or by folding paper several times and cutting out holes then unfolding and sticking on a contrasting colour. I also remember spending hours making designs with a ruler and compass. I remember planning these out with my brother with explicit conversations of how we would fit more rooms and pathways into the space of our shared room. Would I have to interpret the slide as both a sliding down and a climbing up in order to do it? Would I end up trapped on the top, or could I finish on the ground where I started?Īt home, we’d build elaborate maze-like cubby houses out of spare mattresses and sheets (we lived in a house where visitors often stayed over). Outside of school, I remember playing a game in each new playground, where I would try to do every part of the play equipment exactly once without crossing my path. In fact, thinking carefully about what is around me in these memories, I seem to be in a hall or a library, rather than in a classroom. I also remember loving playing with polydrons and attribute tiles, but again the memory is just about the fascination of playing with them, and not about any particular maths class. Interestingly, my memory is only of the blocks themselves and I can’t pinpoint a year level or a teacher that goes with this. I remember absolutely loving the MAB blocks, in particular the moment when I replaced ten units with a long, and ten longs with a flat and ten flats with a block. Eight-year-old me was an astute little person.Īcross my primary school career, I do remember a strong feeling of pleasure and fascination associated with construction toys. I was angry because how could I possibly know that? Everything else was just logic and so I could figure it out for myself, but you can’t figure out the meaning of a word without more context. I distinctly remember it being a multiple choice question and ruling out two of the answers as ridiculous, but basically having to guess between the other two. The only thing I got wrong was the meaning of the word “net” in the phrase “net weight” as you might see listed on a packet of food.
VAGUELY REMEMBER CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA FULL
I dutifully did the test and actually got almost full marks. I had been sick with asthma for a couple of weeks and came back to school on the day of a test. The only other maths class memory is of a test I did in Year 3. Another was my memory of my Year 6 teacher attempting to teach us averages using cricket. One was my memory of doing a maths assignment about one million dollars, where the financial aspect distressed me to tears. I’ve related two of them already in this blog. In primary school, I have very few memories of actually being in a maths class, and all of them are negative.
In the spirit of those two, here are some of my earliest memories about maths and play. In Stuart Brown’s “ Play“, he urged me to think about my play history to see what influenced my current feelings and tendencies about play. In Tracy Zager’s “ Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had“, she urged me to think about my maths autobiography to see what influenced my current feelings about maths.
Two books I’ve read recently have encouraged me to investigate my memories from childhood.
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