I'm reminded this week why I am a math teacher and not a house painter, at least by profession... This week I have been a house painter... not a great one, but a house painter none the less. In the middle of a hot sunny day perched ten feet up on a ladder, my mind wanders off to how to present old problems in new ways to challenge my students (wow, school starts in less than two weeks...goodbye summertime!) Unfortunately there is no place for a note pad and pencil up there... my life as a painter is not well organized.... OK, my life as a teacher is not that well organized either, but I do it everyday, and so I eventually get most of the things I need to do my job somewhere in the neighborhood of the classroom. When I'm painting, I'm trying to hold a paintbrush, a can of paint, a scraper for those old crusty places on my house... a damp rag for the places my paint flies when I swat at a hornet attracted by the smell of fresh paint... and there is a flat piece I use to keep me from mucking up the trim on the windows.... except it is down on the ground when I need it..

Ok, I know real painters have all this worked out with a little ladder tray or something... but I paint when the house looks so bad the neighbors start to complain... I would much rather be reading a good math book, or writing one... but the neighbors... Ok... and if I had the little ladder tray thingy, it would be buried somewhere in that mess in the tool shed behind bikes that haven't been out for five years and a couple of pieces of floor that I might need someday if the floor ever rots through... (It could happen!)

And it gets lonely up there... you have a great idea, who do you tell? In class I can pop off on anything and my kids act like I'm not half stupid. They may offer improvements or just praise my idea in an obvious attempt to suck up for a better grade; but on the ladder, the only conversation is some odd-ball walking by on the walk yelling up, "Hey, you missed a spot... Ha ha..."

Sad truth is, I probably did. I get two kinds of spots when I paint, the spots I miss that still show the old paint through, or worse yet, the untreated clapboard and the ones where my base paint flies off and lands on the trim color. So I smile at the jerk on the sidewalk and think smugly to myself that he probably paid $8000 to have some High school drop-out paint his house. My only expese is a few gallons of paint, a few brushes, and whatever the medical bills are when I fall off this ladder.

My students are great, year after year (knock wood). I hear teachers tell me how rotten their classes are and I feel lucky... I seem to come across kids with imagination and creativity. In the last week one of my ex students wrote during his first week at MIT. I'm thinking he might need a good welcome to the college, so I wrote a couple of other of my ex students there and asked them to drop him a "hello". The first answer I get back is a just-completed PhD who I had way back in Misawa, Japan (95?) . Now Craig is not just a smart kid with a PhD and a beautiful and brilliant wife, he is also a recent finalist on the American Inventor, and the fact that he didn't win points out some inherent flaw in reality shows. He also happens to be right in the middle of deciding whether to take a position in North Carolina State or accept a post-doc position for a couple of years, and all the while he and his partner are trying to develop this new claw for market....and yet.... he takes time off to invite the new kid to dinner...

SEE, I get great kids, nice kids, kids who care about people they don't even know... Do painters ever get that kind of feedback? But there is one more reason I'm a teacher... you see the kid in the picture up top? That is my grandson Xander, just past two years old. Now the problem he was engaged in when I took this picture, was how to get a drink from a spray nozzle that was longer than his arm... I watched, took pictures, and 30 minutes passed. He sprayed himself in the face, studied the way it was connected, the trigger... and then he did something miraculous, got a drink (he wasn't even thirsty, I don't think) and dropped the hose and went looking for his next problem... I won't spoil the problem by telling you how he did it, but he made his grandpa proud.

I figure if this kid can struggle that long with a problem, he has the makings of a pretty good mathematician, so while I'm waiting for the right moment to share the big ideas of math with him, I'm using everybody else's kids to practice on, so when the big chance comes, I'll be able to do it right. I'm laying the foundation, as I rock him off to sleep I whisper stories about Cardano and Tartaglia. That's why I'm a math teacher, the great kids I've had in the past, and the great ones I know are coming...

Boy, two whole weeks till school starts... and I can't wait.