There’s a sign outside the neighborhood elementary school that clarifies the school’s policy on taking off jackets at recess.  (It’s been balmy the last few days.)  Children in grades K-2 are to keep their jackets on, children in grades 3-5 may take them off.

I’ve watched many battles over jacket-wearing, and I don’t quite understand it.  When kids get cold, they usually (in the absence of actual thermostatic dysfunction, which the reading I’ve done suggests is extremely rare) act quickly.  And they’re not usually quiet about it.  Getting their needs met is not something children tend to take lightly.

So it’s a little strange that we decide to try to regulate their temperatures for them.  To me it seems like a recipe for not learning how to regulate various things for yourself in much the same way as scheduling meals and eating regardless of hunger can teach kids to eat when they don’t need to and shouldn’t.  We tell them they’ll be cold, if they don’t wear a jacket, though we have no idea how they’ll actually feel because their hormonal makeup is entirely different from ours. (As each of ours is from everyone else’s.)  They don’t get the chance to find out whether they’re hot or cold, how many layers they need, whether they need a jacket or not.

If it’s too warm to be wearing a coat, left to their own devises, kids know.  And similarly, if they’re too cold, they can put coats on.  We say these things, like “wear a coat or you’ll be cold,” with good intentions, but they don’t always hold up under inspection.  When kids resist, it’s worth a look to find out what the source of their resistance may be…

Yet another suggestion that things are not always as they seem. This reminds me of how many folks I’ve heard say that they can only focus on what someone’s saying if they don’t make eye contact, though we tend to assume it’s the opposite. Take a look at this summary of a study (published earlier this year in Applied Cognitive Psychology) about the effect of doodling on recall.

I’m going to get a reputation for the unwise practice of recommending books before I’ve finished reading them, but I can’t help myself.  I have read several pages from the beginning, several from the middle, and a few from the end of Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them, and there is so much in it that can be so useful in so many ways for so many people I cannot wait to start talking about it.  You can read a few pages on Google books…

I’ll post more soon when I come up with the words…

I consistently find that it’s easier to generate excitement for math when it’s called something else.  (A game, for example, even when it shamelessly involves multiplication, is drastically better received when it’s called a game than when it’s called math.)  I’m beginning to think that it would be wise if we retired the word math for awhile.  It’s come to embody, represent, and inspire such dread, fear, loathing, and hostility (often compounding over the course of generations) that I think it deserves a break.  And many of us deserve a break from it.

This is not at all to say that we should stop doing the things we’ve come to refer to as math.  Just that we could stop using the word.  For now.  Not only does it inspire the less-than-healthy and productive states I mentioned above, our general understanding of what it actually is has been whittled down to something that could only appeal to a very few humans who happen to function in a particular way.  Math, defined broadly, is the kind of stuff anyone could find a home in; not just those who happen to have a proclivity for memorizing columns of numbers, or substituting letters for numbers in some prescribed manner.   There is room in the math I know for artists, builders, designers, extraverts, poets, chefs.  And room for it in all of their various pursuits.  When treated well and generously conceived, math has the ability to invite, inspire, and intrigue.

The earliest mathematicians were a varied lot.  To them math was a playful, welcoming thing.  They’d have been sorry, I’m sure, to hear it spoken of today as it is.  So perhaps we should shelve the word, breathe some life back into the observation, rendering, and capturing of pattern, relationship, quantity, and then invite it back to the party when we can treat it as the spacious entity we deserve to have it be.

My friend Ben taught his daughter how to ride a bike without using training wheels, and without running behind or alongside her holding on to the seat. He found her a bike that fit her well when the seat was at its highest setting, and then lowered the seat. She could touch the ground this way, and taught herself how to ride by starting herself rolling along, then picking her feet up off the ground and trying out the pedaling process. If she started to wobble, she could just put her feet down. Once she started to get it, and felt comfortable enough to take a little more risk, Ben raised the seat a bit, continuing as she got more and more confident until the seat was at the optimal height for her.

I can’t help thinking this isn’t an easier way to learn than the traditional training wheel approach. When you’ve got that extra set of wheels, you don’t have to pay such close attention to balance, and thus aren’t likely to actually get it as quickly. Given that most training wheels are also not perfectly engineered and balanced, learners have the additional challenge of keeping the bike from listing to one side or the other, depending on which training wheel is lower. This leaning causes the rider to have to compensate by tipping his or her body in the opposite direction, which means they’re not positioned properly to balance. If you keep the rider low enough to the ground, he or she gets to essentially start from scratch, and work up to balancing and pedaling on his or her own time.