thoughts on 3

Last night at dinner, R asked me, "Mom, what makes 3?" Hmmm...I had no idea what she meant. "Three what?" I inquired. But she asked again, "what makes 3?" It took me a while, but I finally understood. Recently, R has shown some interest in numbers, particularly what happens to them when you put them together or take them away. We'll hold up a certain number of fingers on one hand and a certain number on the other and ask, for instance, how many does 3 and 2 make? R then counts: 1, 2, 3... until she gets the answer. About a week ago, during a long drive to Dallas, she took the exercise a step further when she asked, "If you take our doggy and Elisa's doggy and Jerry David's doggies, how many does that make?" After exchanging smiles with me, Dad suggested that she could use her fingers for this one, too. She was up for the challenge. "There's Beatrice (one)," she began, holding up one finger, "Buddy (two), and Jerry David's two doggies..." It took her a few minutes, but she figured it out and was so proud of herself. Mom and Dad were, of course, thrilled, and started giving her similar "problems," which she did until she let us know that she was "done with counting now."

So once I figured out what she was asking last night, we spent some time holding up different combinations of fingers that "make 3." Being a mother of a three-year-old has has opened my eyes to what it means to really think. I've noticed, through R's questions and just different things she says, that she really spends time thinking and problem-solving. Remembering my days as a middle- and high-school math teacher (which already seem a bit distant to me), I wonder if the willingness to think through problems is something that kids have early on and then lose. Ironically, it seems that as kids progress in school, they somehow start believing that learning (particularly mathematics) involves tricks. Instead of spending the necessary time and effort to work through a problem, kids seem to voluntarily split into the categories of those who "get it" and those who don't. While I recognize that learning theory is more complicated than that, I would suggest that more students would be successful if they could think like a 3-year-old. It will be interesting to discover my role in encouraging such thinking as my children grow up.