Teaching Fractions can Make me Cry

Telling stories is one of my favorite ways to capture kids and convince them that math is really not all that scary or difficult. Because, the hardest thing about teaching math in junior high is that, by the time I get them, they've had six or seven years for someone else to scare them half to death and convince them that they can't do this stuff.

So when I get to fractions in sixth grade, inevitably, some of them groan and go, "I hate fractions!"

I've got lots of stories about how kids know how to do fractions just naturally... About how any two year old understands when she is not getting her fair share when the dessert gets divided up, and how they all "get" how to split up a dollar between them and their friends, etc.

Today, for some reason, I decided to use my family to illustrate. Not the family I live in now. Not the family I formed as an adult. The family I grew up in. Me and the 3 rotten brothers -- Hank, Gregg, Kurt. That makes four and that's a real easy way to talk about halves and quarters and, by extension, eighths and sixteenth and ... Well, yeah. Fractions.

Well, kids just love to get "into" the teacher's life. So we "got" the fraction part handled and that was all clear and kewl, and then the trap opened up and swallowed me whole.

One of my precious darlings said -- where do your brothers live? Oh shit! I took a deep breath and started in... Hank lives in Dallas, Texas. Kurt lives in Denver, Colorado.

Breathe.

Stand there and look at all those bright, earnest, sweet, young faces.

"What about Gregg?" they want to know.

Breathe.

Gregg died 15 years ago.

"Oh... We're sorry. What happened to him?"

He had AIDS.

"Oh... How old was he?"

He was 31.

And three of them stood up and came and hugged me. And I stood there and cried. About the quarter of my life that still feels like it is missing.

Fractions.

swan