Claudia Mills’ latest book Fractions = Trouble! is about Wilson, who is having trouble with math in his third grade classroom, and so his parents hire a math tutor to help him. Embarrassed by this, Wilson is determined to keep it a secret from everyone at school. Wilson’s interactions with his tutor, his brother Kipper, his best friend Josh, and his hamster Pip help Wilson to figure out what really matters to him.
Like all Claudia Mills’ books (she is a philosophy professor at University of Colorado who has written dozens of children’s books), the story is philosophically rich, generating questions about friendship, knowledge of other minds, learning and education, and the nature of happiness. And it’s a great story for figuring out that everyone learns in different ways and that the fact that you don’t understand something right away doesn’t mean that you can’t become good at it!
Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Since 1995 she has taught philosophy in classrooms from preschool to college and beyond. A frequent writer and speaker about precollege philosophy, Jana is the founding president of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People. Follow her on Twitter: @JanaMohrLone