You guys should see yaymath.org
the way he teaches his class actually seems like the people there want to learn math (or at least thats how i percieve it).
Children already know how to think. It’s in the process of school socialization that they develop the reflexive authority based view of truth.
It’s perfectly obvious that the validity of a statement should be held on its own merit as this is demonstrated in the course of living, first through normal life experience and through the relationship with the family. It is biologically valuable for authority to be there in a child’s early years, but children instinctively seek agency as they are able.
It is only the recent invention of the schoolmaster-student dynamic that the wires of fear and thought, and therewith survival, have been crossed as the urgency of life has been replaced with an artificial scaricity of autonomy in the school house.
I do not reject the value of learning logic, but it’s a sorry antidote to smother kids with logic games when the faculty for genius is crushed in the process. Trying to noodle ones way out of the statist paradigm by making it a tad bit better is counterproductive if not outright self-destructive.
check out the http://www.criticalthinkeracademy.com/ its pretty easy stuff.helps to demonstrate peoples own natural bias.great introduction to logic reason.i think the kids would love the bits on back masking and conspiracies.
Many have already alluded to the natural inquisitiveness of children and how only a public run education system could deter such natural curiosity. I will add a few comments of how I practice education with my two sons and in the classroom, but this is only my opinion…and to each their own. I will start with the classroom.
As some here may know, I teach college mathematics and run a website called Hands on Math . I truly believe that as mathematics becomes further and further separated from applications, the more trivial their answers become to students. Math, as a subject, is rooted in mans desire to answer natural phenomena. Only recently has it become void of this. In fact, even students who do relatively well in mathematics tend to still do horribly in application type problems (in my classroom, word problems tend to have less than a 40% pass rate). Why is this? Because the math education community has dismissed application problems as a benchmark for subject mastery. Even the textbooks shove word problems to the end of the practice problem sets. With this being said, my advice for helping your students develop the ability to think (in a math classroom) would be to close the gap between the trivial and the valuable math by rooting everything in an application problem. If you want to teach percentages, send your students on a classroom date and have them calculate the tip. If you want to teach area of a circle, have them calculate the blast radius of a fire cracker. I’m not promising record breaking state-test scores, but at least you won’t have to compete with boredom and you will assuredly peak their curiosity.
As for how I raise my own two boys to think, I use stories. I may tell upwards of 10 stories a day dealing with everything from escaping a volcano to how to better treat others. My boys love them, they are a great tool for their curiosity and they learn. Story telling dates back longer than written language. It is how our ancestors learned.
How??? I sometimes try to put things in allegory form for my kids but I always struggle. Are there some “quick tips” or “cheater templates” I can use to help with this?
Clayton -
@ Clayton
My oldest is 4, so it will be different depending on age (I started telling stories when he turned 1, but they were more like nursery rhymes).
All my stories involve my son Sebastian (or my other son) as the main character. Sometimes he is the hero sometimes not. Over time you get a feel for the types of stories he likes-- as they will become inattentive quickly if you are boring them. In the beginning I found that I had to make them snappy from the start, for example,
“So there he was, Sebastian was next to kick in kickball, the whole game revolved around this kick…”
From here we might make him kick the winning kick but notice another boy on the other team crying and complaining. The theme might be how to loose with dignity. But I never say what the theme is; I just base the story around it.
Another story might be about how he and his friends were lost in the woods and how they learned to survive by building a fire, keeping warm and signaling for help. You can use these stories to teach them things like how not to talk to strangers or how to call 911 or even remember their address.
You can also involve your child in the story telling, like making them a general and you the captain and asking should we fire the archers first or send in the cavalry.
It doesn’t matter if you stumble in coming up with something. Just go with it and they will love it. Start out short, maybe one a night. Then it will be two, etc. Soon you can find all sorts of things to fit into stories. I love throwing in some off the wall concept like a black hole while he travels in space, I will make it really mysterious and tell him that their very secretive. He might have so many questions about black holes at the end of your story that you turn on youtube and watch a 10 min clip. Best of luck!
One way to teach kids how not to think is to indoctrinate them with religion at an early age. I remember when I was six years old, my father “introduced me to God.” He told me of earth’s creation and heaven and hell. Then I asked my dad, “who created God?” He snapped back at me and told me to shut up.
Great point. Children don’t have all those adult bad habits. The same applies somewhat to certain people who don’t identify as intellectuals. Since they don’t place themselves in that category they often don’t pick up the habits and instead end up “going it alone” in their free-time musings, sometimes coming up with insights that elude many intellectuals (as do children, on occasion).