Say it on a walk

A woman in Amman has taught mathematics to twelve-year-olds for most of her life, and she has decided to write down how she does it. Not for a publisher. For the young teachers at her school, and for herself, because she wants to find out whether what she does is a method or a habit.

She opens a document and freezes. The first paragraph sounds like a ministry circular. The second sounds like someone pretending to be her. After a week she has four hundred words and dislikes all of them.

She does not lack anything to say. Ask her about fractions over dinner and she will talk for twenty minutes, with examples, jokes, the mistake every child makes and the drawing that fixes it. The voice is there. It just does not survive an empty page, which asks her to perform rather than explain.

So change the setting. Take one of the new teachers for a long walk around the neighbourhood in the evening, leave the phone recording in a pocket, and teach her. Out loud, to a person, answering the questions she asks along the way. Then type it up.

What comes back will be rough. It will also sound like someone who knows a thing talking to someone who wants to learn it, which is exactly what the page could not give her.

Writing down what you know is worth doing even if nobody ever prints it. The thinking gets clearer as you explain, and the explaining is a gift to whoever comes next.

The first draft does not need to be written. It needs to be said, to someone, and then kept.