My cousin invited me to play an online word game with her yesterday.  I don’t like spending any extra time at the computer, but I’ve got a weak spot for word games, so I agreed to try it.  After playing once on my lunch break, and being something less than satisfied with my score, I found myself waiting for the day to be over so I could try again.  I knew I wasn’t going to come anywhere close to scoring as high as the others who were playing, but I really wanted to do better than I had done.  It made me curious - the outcome of the game has absolutely no impact on my life whatsoever, but there I was looking forward to playing it again, just to see how I could do at this thing that I find interesting.  I didn’t just want to play, though, I wanted to See How I Did.  I wanted the results, and I wanted to keep comparing them with my other results.

I’ve seen this happen with kids, too, this kind of intense relationship with results - whether it’s short lived or longer standing.  But I’ve also seen lots of resistance to results.  I think that adults think that kids don’t want to know how they’re doing, or don’t think it’s important to know, but in fact they really do want to know how they’re doing. It’s just that they want to know how they’re doing on the things that they’re convinced are important.  That of course raises the question of whether or not they should have to be convinced of what’s important, and I won’t get into that now, because I only have a few minutes and that one’s a real button-pusher, but I thought it might be a good inquiry to raise.  See where you notice your children being really interested in results, and where you see them being less interested…

If you’re anything like me (and apparently Ira Glass as well), you tend to tune out  when the newsfolks start their bank crisis talk.  I was skeptical that even This American Life could pull off a clear enough explanation that I might begin to make sense of all this “toxic asset” talk and the like, but pull it off they did. Here’s a link to their page with the audio. You can also download a transcript…

I’ve been doing fractions for several decades, and only yesterday did I find out how the numerator (the number on the top) and the denominator (the one on the bottom) got their names. I’m not sure that knowing why they’re called what they’re called will help too many folks who struggle with fractions, but I’m pretty sure it will help a few, so here goes. Read more