yellow ribbon

A palace of images
In my country
remember Gilad and other prisonners

what is integrity?

When you hear someone say something about someone else, do you stop and check if the grounds are honest? Have you heard both sides of the story? Are the persons focussing on the negative or on the positive aspects of the other? Is the person neutral of tone or e.g. resentful? Who is listening and who is not? Who is curtuous?
The truth is not necessarily what most people say, remember how many used to think the earth is flat and were prepared to execute a scientist who said otherwise. Not the number of people defines integrity. I then asked myself what then defines it and came to the conclusion that when you don't know you need more information, when I don't know I refrain judgement until I have more knowledge about a certain question. Most of the knowledge I have of actuality is of oneliners, short items on the news and we know about bias that accompagnies those. I don't really know much, unless I read more in depth, and even then what do I know.

mindmapping with number theory (3)

Yesterday was the third day of mindmapping with number theory. We tackled mindmapping today. We wrote the number one in the middle of a piece of paper and read a difficult piece of writing about the number one. Then we tried to understand little by little what was written and decide what we wanted to write on the mindmap. This was difficult because the ideas in the text were difficult propositions like "discrete numbers cannot be divided by zero and this is similar yet opposite to the number one, all discrete numbers can be divided by one." Then we finished with trying to learn the four propositions that we found using a mnemonic strategy, using a list of rhyming words, and inventing images that are easy to remember with the proposition. The first one was of lots of groups of toes that could all be divided by one. I have fun doing this with children who have difficulties with different parts of learning and seing how they manage anyway.

teaching number theory as remediation and enrichment

Yesterday I had a difficult day, my brain was not working completely. Although I'm on medication I thought "I want a pill." But I still went on and gave my facultative lesson of number theory to four elementary school children that have each different challenges. Although the first thing that leaves me when my brain has 'one of those days' is order (I'm more disorganized) and one child immediately felt more disorganised, they still enjoyed talking about numbers. One couldn't remember what it was what we are doing. Maybe I should write it down for him. We talked about if it's possible to divide by zero and why not. We talked about that even scientists can make mistakes with numbers. I was afraid one of the children might find it too difficult, because I tried to raise the level, but they followed. I made it easy enough and difficult enough at the same time. Don't ask me to put it on paper...

remediation and enrichment

I've started helping at the new school, a creative school that gets the best results out of children, e.g. making music instruments from both professional (strings, plectrum) and waste material. What I'm doing is mindmapping with number theory and the result after one half hour is that all four children didn't want me to stop after half an hour. It remediates language, maths skills, creative thinking and memory at the same time. I can recommend it as enrichment, motivator, remediation and attention training at the same time in education. It seems to work. After I did a remediating math crossword puzzle and the attention of the children was very good. Of course it's fun to also include some history or funny examples.

baby morality

Do babies have morality? It seems they start not as an empty leave. In this research children react on puppets that act 'naughty'. They realize this. This would mean it is possible to inherit morality either through genetics, or through the soul or both. Parenting is then more fixing mistakes and changing pathways than really building from scratch. This means children can turn out good without good parenting, or bad without bad parenting. This means excellent parents can have morally challenging children, as indeed happens, and the worst parents can have morally excellent children.

not knowledge but wisdom

We should be more interested in wisdom than knowledge. But how to teach wisdom in children. Logical thinking, knowing the difference between true and untrue seems a good start. Then it becomes difficult because virtues are dependent on value systems that may vary according to background. Although I think you can translate concepts of value systems and find out there is some accord possible between different value systems. We can agree to believe in laws of nature, in the good of a social system, in the necessity of a law system, in good and wrong although we may differ in detail which makes the world so interestingly diverse. How to teach wisdom according to differences? It is not impossible. A 'tour d'horizon'? Discuss virtues? Teach tools? Are there wisdom tools? Being able to listen to each other seems very important.
Understanding language rather than focussing on how it's written. Maybe we should define limits, in order to be able to keep your own value system but still develop a common wisdom with limits for the teacher as well. Difficult.