Fraction Stax!

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.


Numbers, by Mary Cornish


Woke up to a rainy day, so spent the morning at school sorting through mathematics supplies. Brought a few things home to organize and fix up.

I really like this sort of old-school wooden manipulative better than the new-fangled plastic things you often end up with these days. In my mind the point of such materials is not simply to demonstrate concepts in a concrete way, it's also to activate and satisfy the student's response to a tactile experience. This second part gets completely undermined when the materials themselves are cheap and unattractive.