Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Starting something new

This is the start of something new. My wife and I had a wonderful discussion over lunch today as our date for Valentine's Day. We were discussing how we are going to educate our daughter who is four years old.

It boils down to this: We must teach her to be literate and numerate. All else is commentary. Once she has those things she can learn virtually everything else.

Literacy and numeracy are shortcuts. Someone can spend an 5, 10, 20 year or an entire lifetime studying how something or other works. They write a book telling all about what they learned. We can then read that book in a matter of hours and we have just saved ourselves 5, 10, 20 year or an entire lifetime and we can springboard off of that to something greater.

Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Most of them are dead but their work survives recorded in books. We can leverage that.

Reading comes from putting letters together into words, into sentences.

Math is the same; in a simpler, more precise language and the first step into pure math is to create within her the understanding that 7 blocks and 7 chips and 7 ducks and 7 days are all the same thing. Just like al the chairs are all chairs whether they are made up of wood, or metal & plastic or are overstuffed.

I've been wanting to do this for sometime and even had another blog on the subject of teaching math to children but I am closing that one down and going with this one as it is going to be a far different style, inspired by this post at Creating Passionate Users

I don't care if you homeschool your children or send them to public or private school. My competition is Ignorance itself. Besides unless you never intent to ever help your children with homework, you will be homeschooling your children at some point.

My general focus will be on mathematics but since math didn't spring forth complete and finished there will be quite a bit of history and color and all kinds of bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.

3 comments:

Prashant said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Prashant said...

This will turn out to be a very good writing, if you continue with the same spirit.
My best wishes for you. I am also interested in teaching.... something like math. Not as a profession, but for the people I care. e.g my niece.

I am registering the blog's feed. Waiting for the updates........

Stephan said...

Teaching goes best when you care the most about your students, I definitely care about my daughter.

I would encourage you to start teaching. It's fun but not always easy, though that is the best part when you come out the other side.