How I Spent My Friday Evening

Since part of my 10-year-old's homework (why elementary students need homework is far beyond me) is to read for 20 minutes each night and write a few sentences summarizing what he's read, I've made reading together an every-evening event. He grabs his book, I grab mine, and we go somewhere in the house--lately it's been the living room--and we read silently. Every once in awhile he'll tell me what's going on in his story, but that's ok. In fact, it's even better.

What am I currently reading, you may ask? Well, I have two teacher's aides. Both are former pre-calculus students of mine from last year, and both are taking AP Calculus this year. It's been a couple of decades since I've been in a calculus class, and when the day comes that they start asking me questions about their homework, I don't want to have to spend 5 minutes reviewing the section they're studying before I'm able to explain to them what's going on.

So I've been studying my calculus book from 1983.

Continuity. Limits. Differentiability. Tonight I even worked some "homework" problems, including finding derivatives of functions directly from the definition. Quite fun, in some respects.

Those students may be my aides, but I'm still a teacher. Their teacher.

Oh, and after reading tonight? Hot tub. Life is good.