Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Caution: Brain at Work!

Today I witnessed the most amazing thing of my teaching career...

The class was working, but Victor finished early. My teacher's aid began writing down some multiplication problems for him to work to occupy his time wisely. He laughed at the problems she wrote down and said, "Too easy!" He then wrote down problems and began working those instead. But...the normal child (and myself) would need to write down the problem, show work for each column, add up my products, and add them for the answer. Well, you should know by now that Victor is not like my other students.
This is what I observed: Victor was standing, throwing a pencil around in the air. I occasionally heard him say a number, but could hear mumbling the entire time. All of a sudden, he would loudly say the answer and then write it down. He is able to work multiplication problems in his head and produce the correct answer. This amazed me. It was almost like Rain Man. Seemingly distracted, not focusing on the problem, he visualized the numbers in his head and was able to work it out. His only problem is writing the answer by the correct problem.

I have no idea what I'm going to do when I have to teach the rest of the class multiplication. Can he teach it for me?

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