from the beginning. lately i have been feeling frustrated at work - what i do everyday is not my dream, it is not my passion, much of the time i don't even feel all that effective. i had a dream a few nights ago that i went back to work at the physics teaching labs. that is the part time job i had while i was in college. the one that i resigned from at the end of every school year and went back to every fall. i loved it. i loved the hands on experimentation. i loved the high tech and the low tech. i loved the retro equipment we had access to. i even loved the monotony of setting the equipment up, taking it down, repairing, constructing numerous copies. i loved teaching through objects.
so this got me to thinking, what is my passion now? what would i do if i found out i only had a few weeks or months to live? certainly not my current job. i thought back to my dream of creating a textbook (or similar) that taught algebra to visual and tactile learners. the abstraction of algebra reveals a magic in numbers. i have met far too many friends who have missed this, are plenty smart, but never "clicked" with their algebra teacher. i have an opportunity to explain a concept to them, finally they understand it, and it stokes my desire to show them the whole picture.
but why the particular link above? my vision of this book is a small, pocket edition. i have several science books of the scale i imagine inherited from my parents; i used to have the college algebra and calculus texts as well, but left them in africa as a resource for the next teacher. they were published by W.A. Benjamin publishers in the 1960's. that company was taken over by the publisher of the above book. i don't know if the above book teaches in the way i imagine, it might, based on the title, but the price and size are far above what i want. there is something about the scale of math and science books of yesteryear that i admire, a density and clarity to the text, concise and to the point.
there is some glimmer of what i imagine in the singapore math textbooks. every problem has a graphic solution. i would like to see how they transition this to algebra, but i am having trouble finding what i am looking for.
i also have inspiration in many of the wooden books, and in the works of Tufte. perhaps someday i can get these pieces to come together.
writing this reminded me of the stories of teaching calculus to 6 year olds. i looked it up (it turned out it was 7 year olds), but the content was inspiring (www.mathman.biz). this is the direction i want to go, but with the emphasis on algebra rather than calculus. this is a set of materials that feels worth ordering. hopefully it is as inspiring when it arrives.
