Sixth-Grade Experience

A little boy I was taking care of was in the sixth grade, and he wanted to know about a particular mathematical problem. It was a relatively simple problem, but I didn’t remember how to do it. I looked through his book to remember how it went so I could explain it. As I was going through his book, I saw the geometry I needed—in a sixth-grade math book! The author of the book didn’t understand what I was seeing, because he was thinking along a totally different line. But I saw in the mathematics of it something I’d been looking for, and it was the key that tied these two primary sequences together.