關於愛，我是個小學生。

To me, this week was a math week, when three of my cousins, two from Megoya, one from Taipei, rushed to my house with bundles of unfinished math drillings and exam practicing sheets about the areas of sectors, trapezoids, rhombuses, and some other fundamentals of circumference radio, rates, and proportions at the level of a fifth to sixth grader’s. Their parents were vexed about their poor performances in primary school math and thus anxious their academic competence for the next coming semester, not to mention the formidable algebra and geometry in junior high. By the grand New Year’s holiday session these days, they asked me for some catholicons for such mathphobia.

I took this request light-heartedly on one hand that I have had an affair with math since long, wherein the world of dialect amid deduction and induction is the key to the universe, lurking patiently, staid and dormant, to wait for some curious British boy culling shells around the reef of numerals to look up smirkingly the splendid, majestic, dazzling starry night sky. I could on the other hand brush up my rusty Japanese by chatting about with the two young kids to upgrade some fashionable usages and jargons modern Japanese now are applying. Besides, I just wanted to break the myth that it is only for mathmaticians and engineers to use math as a tool to daily needs. I would like to show them, at least to my uncles and aunts along with my naïve cousins, that math is one of the most facile, amiable, vernacular, and clear-cut languages I’ve ever experienced to intimate nicely the infinite and magnificent world to humans.

Opening the math text books, I first explained slowly, not because of my tolerance to children but of my poor Japanese, to my cousins, slowly enough to make them laugh. In their little cute mind-set, they were as if too astonished to apprehend why there should be such people in the world who speak lousy Japanese like me. However, they had no other choice but make do within the situation, and it seemed to be a must that they couldn’t fly back to Japan after the vacation without getting all their math assignments right, even it was too fine a print for them to heed of.

Partially intellectually, or maybe partially miraculously, at my patient yet stammering tutorial step by step, they should come to understand what I meant, or more specifically, what the questions were supposed to say. They gradually ‘saw’ into the questions, and the descriptions and numbers were no longer breezing through them. Capturing the demand and condition of each question, they soon solved all of them regardless of the manifold formula and calculation. I realized that it is not that hard to teach children math if you do know the problem lies not in math itself, but in language, a means to communicate math with children, to let them grasp solidly what the situation really is, and further to solicit the intrinsic talent of logical processing abilities out of their minds, of all the people actually. As for the mathematic properties and functions, they are merely the easy parts which are so simple as the last to know in a math class.

Should math teachers know this, more pupils would know math.