Currently reading
Don Quixote
Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version
The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance
Final Harvest: Poems
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
Tales from the Tao: The Wisdom of the Taoist Masters
The Emperor of Nihon-Ja: Book Ten (Ranger's Apprentice)
This motivational book compares the current system of math education to teaching art by starting with memorizing brush types and sizes and ending up with paint-by-number in high school. He says that while we are taught mechanical aspects of math (memorizing facts and formulas:memorizing brush types and sizes), not only are we never taught what mathematics really is, but we aren't aware that what we are learning isn't truly mathematics: it isn't what mathematicians do. So, we graduate high school having never learned math, but thinking we have. He gives a few examples of the process of the imaginative exploration that is math and encourages the reader to go play with numbers. I would have appreciated a "further reading" list and a list of starter questions that a teacher could pose to his students while he is getting started on his journey of playing with numbers.