Wrapping the point in silk

Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn.
Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it.
We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn.
Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.
~ Peggy Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I'm An Unschooler
MJ helped one of my nieces with her long division homework the other day. Hearing that she had done this got me thinking again about what a waste of time and brain cells it is to learn long division.

#1 - As Pam Sorooshian pointed out in her math talk at Good Vibrations last year, the precision of long division is just not what we need out in the real world. Think about when you use division in real life: calculating the best value at the grocery store, figuring gas mileage, seeing how many of something you can use in a given time period or distribute to each person, and so on. And how do you do it? In your head, using estimates. "258 miles on 7.8 gallons, um, that's a little better than 30 mph." Done. Typically, we don't need to know that it was 33.07692 mph. And if we do...

#2 - Most of us carry calculators with us all day every day. We have calculators on our computers, in our phones, in our PDAs, in our watches, magnetized to our dashboards, clipped to our grocery carts, whatever. With a little practice, we can use these faster than we can estimate in our heads.

So, why are they still teaching long division in schools???? It is but one example of how schools have failed to adapt.

Once upon a time, it was vital for a certain group of people to know that wearing a silk shirt under armor might save your life, since the silk makes it easier to remove an arrow if you get shot. Somebody figured this out, and the word spread, and it became part of the standard warrior curriculum. Back then, knowing this technique was a matter of life and death. Nowadays, it's a quaint little factoid.

I'd rather have my kids learning about that than long division. Long division is a dead end, an exercise in tedium, a compelling bit of evidence that "math is hard" (not to mention unpleasant), or worse, that "I am stupid."

That little silk tidbit, though... Now that's interesting. I don't remember where I learned it—probably in a romance novel—but I looked it up on the Internet. It led me to Mongols and absorbency and sutures and animal rights for worms. And it led me to wonder: Who figured this out and how? Can you imagine the circumstances...? Chloe and I laughed together as we talked about it.

In other words, that little tidbit is fun. It opens doors. It engages my brain and reminds me that the world is full of things to discover.

That is what learning should be. I wonder why our schools haven't figured that out.

Good Vibrations 2009

The bright side of a little mid-conference insomnia: I have a chance to get down some of my thoughts and memories from Good Vibrations so far.

Spoiler alert! My notes below about specific talks reference bits that will be ever so much better if you listen to the whole talk, available for download a while after the conference. You can give them a listen and then come back and read the fragments I chose to highlight.

Update: I just discovered that Jeff posted his talk here. Yay!

Unschooling and Math by Pam Sorooshian. Lots of good stuff in this talk, but there were a couple of things that especially grabbed my brain. One was the reminder of how disconnected from reality is the math they teach in class. Pam led us through a little exercise that illustrated this pretty clearly: Make a little list of situations in your real life where you use math. (We came up with tipping, figuring gas mileage, figuring value at the grocery store, doubling or halving recipes, and budgeting.) Ask yourself (1) what method you use to do those calculations (paper and pencil, calculator/computer, or in your head), and (2) how important precision is in the result of each calculation. Compare your answers to what school requires.

Pam also told a very cool little story in which her daughter Rosie was working (playing) her way through an activity book one day while they were driving in the car. Rosie became frustrated with a page that asked how many kids were in each classroom if a school with ten classrooms had 80 students. Rosie complained that it didn't provide enough information. When Pam explained she should just divide 80 by 10, Rosie said (and I love this), "It's not a division problem!" Having never been in a math classroom, Rosie could see all the variables (ages or grade levels of the students, content of the classes being taught, and so on) that formal math instruction requires kids to simply ignore, thereby ensuring that kids know that math (or rather, the math that they are being taught) has little to do with reality.

In Pursuit of a Passionate Life by Jeff Sabo. Lots of good stuff in this one, too, but the highlight for me—the moment that had me teary-eyed—was when Jeff talked about showing inner-city kids three numbers and encouraging them to guess what the numbers represented. The numbers were (I think) 1.7, 75, and 8. He said the kids never got all three. They are, respectively, a specific person's high school GPA, the number of jobs the individual has had, and the number of times this person was suspended from school. Got a picture of this person? Lovely. Throw it out the window. The individual is Jeff. He has a masters degree and a successful career in the corporate world, he is an amazing dad married to an amazing woman who clearly likes him a whole lot, and he is a talented and inspiring writer and speaker. He's also one hell of a bass player!

So, just imagine those kids discovering how little their own numbers could predict what their future held in store.

My own numbers were "better" (unless you count each contract as a job—then I might have Jeff beat), but they carried just as many expectations for my future. It was a heavy burden, and one I might have set down for the first time yesterday.

Strangers in a Strange Land chat. Shonna and I hosted this circle chat yesterday. We went in hoping to encourage and benefit from some brainstorming about how to help other people's kids when we see them being victimized by harsh parenting. I think it went pretty well. Here are the tools we discussed. Which of these is the best to pull out in any given situation will depend on the situation and your resources at the moment.

• Empathize with the parent. We've all been there in that overwhelmed moment, and we all know snapshot moments do not necessarily reflect the whole of the parent-child relationship. Also, those of us (yours truly) who started out as traditional parents can (should be able to) empathize more than most.
• Validate the child's experience. A small verbal expression of your understanding of the child's perspective can provide a lot of comfort to the child, and it just might help the parent make a shift, too. For example, suppose you see a child in a store crying because he's been denied candy or a toy. You can say, "It's hard to see all these cool things and not be able to take them home, isn't it?"
• Say "I've been there. Here are some resources that have helped me a lot," and then hand over a card that lists a few of your favorite parenting Web sites. This one lets you immediately withdraw from the situation; the parent doesn't have/get to respond.
• Say (even if it's not true), "You know, the exact same thing happened with us. Here's what worked for us..." and then describe the parenting that you wish you were seeing.
• Interject with a little comment that might jolt the parent into taking a breath. My example was Count to a million, Mom.

I might be missing a couple, but I'm getting sleepy finally. Thanks to all the women and men who helped with that list! More later.