My Earliest Math Memories

When I start teaching a new group of students, I often ask them to share with me their "Math Autobiographies", a brief written description of their best, worst, and earliest memories of doing math.  Reading these helps me get a better understanding of where my students come from, and who they are at this point in time as math students.

I don't usually share my Math Autobiography, but I thought this blog would be a good place to start.  So here's one of my earliest math memories.  I'll share some of my best and worst math memories later.

When I was in second or third grade, I remember doing lots of rote problems for classwork and homework.  Multiple-digit addition and multiplication sticks in my brain for some reason.  I also remember doing many long division problems, but those probably came later.  Anyway, I remember not really enjoying doing lots of addition and multiplication, but there were these problems at the bottom of the page in a brightly colored box, with a little cartoon monkey hanging on the side.  These were the "challenge" problems, and I can remember rushing through the rest of my work, just to see what the challenge monkey had in store for me.  I think there was one that showed a line of squares, with common edges, and the question was something like how many sticks are needed to make a line of five squares?  Ten squares?  100 squares?  Maybe I'm just making that problem up from another memory, but the excitement I felt about that challenge monkey and the more interesting problems it signaled was real.

I tried to do an internet search for the text book, but not knowing anything other than the years I might have used the book, I wasn't able to find an actual example of the monkey and his challenge problems.  I do still enjoy challenge problems, however, and I will still happily work through some "grunt work" if I know it will help me reach something interesting at the end.