Corbin's Lesson

The other day I was teaching a lesson in a fourth grade classroom on finding area and perimeter of irregular polygons. The teacher and I had the kids use toothpicks to create a floor plan of their "dream bedrooms." They could put anything in their dream rooms they wished, and unsurprisingly, they did. Swimming pools, hot tubs, roller rinks, skate parks, baseball diamonds, trap doors, art studios, recording studios, game rooms, ice cream counters, ornate hamster labyrinths, personal libraries: they were all there.

While the other kids filled their 12 x 18 inch papers with elaborate wishes and nooked and crannied floor plans, Corbin had just one small rectangle in the middle of his paper, with the words "My Bed" in one corner, "My Brother's Crib" in another corner, and "Our Dresser" and "Closet" in the remaining corners. We thought maybe he had misunderstood the directions and didn't know he could make up anything he wanted, so his teacher asked him about it.

Corbin explained, "Well, everyone wants these really cool things in their rooms, but I just want what I already have. Sometimes people don't even realize that the things they want most are the things they already have! It's like in the movie The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy tapped her shoes together at the end of the movie and said, "There's no place like home." She was right! There is really no place like home!"

Sometimes I teach kids. Other times, they teach me.