I have found that I say Boring is another way of saying, “I don’t get it and since I don’t get it, I don’t have any patience for why you are stoked about it.”

I love talking about how people write about issues like disease vectors including zombies or vampires or why handwashing matters or even about why Goneril really wasn’t trying to stab King Lear in the back.

I think your passion (and I’d like to hope mine) serves as an inspiration to your students. What’s true is that what WE are excited in and passionate about is what we teach best.

My point being that whilst you are measuring supermarket checkout throughput, those people are probably sitting alone in a darkened room, staring at a colorful flickering light.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglSCuG31P4

You have a brilliant mind, Dan, and one of the things I’ve noticed about brilliant minds is that they subject themselves to the most intense standards of excellence possible– often far beyond those they impose upon their peers. As a result, however, the relentless search for a sense of competence– How can *I* solve this problem? What can *I* say to students to cut through their solopsism? etc– can obscure the fact that when dealing with other human beings, the answers to questions about them have much less to do with your reality, than with *theirs*.

So your frustrated response to your positive commenters is telling, I think. They’re not intelligent people who wish to support you and mean you well (their reality), but simply “enablers,” because you perceive their answers to be useless to you (your reality).

Similarly, a tweet which can be used to cut a disdainful teen down to size appeals because it’s a righteous, five second response which allows you to continue your math lesson. This allows you to overlook not only the fact that it doesn’t answer your ultimate question, but that it is also, frankly, a pretty demeaning thing to say to a kid, even if it is true (and I’m not convinced it is).

Anyway, I don’t mean to make any sweeping or vengeful judgements here about your capacity for compassion– not at all. You wouldn’t even be asking these things if you didn’t care about other people. I mean only to say that in messy, wonderful, heart-of-teaching questions like “Why are my kids afraid of passion?”, the answer isn’t going to come from analytical concision, or from the perfect pithy remark. It’s going to come from the long, equally messy, often contradictory, and multi-facted process of knowing your kids.

So ask them. Observe them. Who *actually* makes the passion-dismissive comments? Who merely agrees with a nod of the head? Who doesn’t agree but stays silent? When? Under what circumstances? Why? And then, why again? And why?

In otherwords…you have to be patient with irresolution.

Is this post a troll? Did you invent this “whatsup” to get us to comment?

If so, you win!

Whatsup says nerd like it’s a bad thing. I’d like to share this definition of nerd from the urban dictionary

An ‘individual’, i.e. a person who does not conform to society’s beliefs that all people should follow trends and do what their peers do. Often highly intelligent but socially rejected because of their obesssion with a given subject, usually computers. Unfortunately, nerds seem to have problems breeding, to the detriment of mankind as a whole.

I think what you’re doing is valuable. It seems like you’re trying to change the minds of students regarding math. I don’t know how effective you are at that, but I can see how students who have traditionally disliked math might start to change their minds after your class or while they’re in your class.

I do think that the questions do become more interesting once you master the skills. It’s a necessary part of the process. Basketball is a lot more interesting when you can dribble and pass. For too many kids the payoff is too far away. Nobody wants to spend time doing the drills. They want to start dunking the balls and shooting 3-pointers. You are allowing your student a taste of the more fun and tangible applications of math before they check out.