By: Martha

Martha — Sat, 11 Apr 2015 03:10:00 +0000

It is noteworthy to me that you picked the line from the song about moonbeams. About a month after MJ was diagnosed with cancer I wrote a poem that was a lot about her and also about the moon. I wrote it in Spanish. The basic idea is that the moon has neither lips nor fingers nor eyes and yet I feel it follows me wherever I go, it reaches out to touch the treetops and to pull at the ocean, and so on.

Mary Jane used patterns a lot to explain things in math. There was always a way to start with a simpler version of a problem, to start with something I felt solid about, and then to work from there. To this day I will opt to figure out percents or to scale amounts using 10’s or by doubling or some other multiplicative pattern usually.

A thing that makes me laugh is how we would do math and talk about math teaching and learning all day, but when it came time to count handouts and supplies and books and numbers of people attending and consent forms, we never could get the numbers to come out right. We’d count once, twice, three times, fall apart laughing, start over, give up, make 10 more in case, complain about having too much (me), complain about not having enough (her), and so it went.

Comments on: Remembering Mary Jane

By: Martha