The qualia beneath the quantia! I agree: restoring these flavors to the academic knowledge we want kids to learn is essential to having them love it… and learn it in the first place. Out of curiosity, what associations did you settle upon for negative numbers?
I'm doing a bit of everything. Today we did some problems about the temperatures of different planets which was fun. Also lots of number lines without a context, but problems about opposites, distances, moving around. Some more about contexts with opposites - hours ahead or behind time zones, credits and debts, etc. Which elevation is the highest, which is the lowest. Stuff like that.
One of your fellow Match Corps tutors, an MIT alum named Jon Blum circa 2004, walked his tutee to the stairway landing of the high school's second floor.
"Take 3 steps up." Kid did. "Okay that's positive 3. Come back here to zero. Now take 3 steps down.....that's negative 3."
The qualia beneath the quantia! I agree: restoring these flavors to the academic knowledge we want kids to learn is essential to having them love it… and learn it in the first place. Out of curiosity, what associations did you settle upon for negative numbers?
I'm doing a bit of everything. Today we did some problems about the temperatures of different planets which was fun. Also lots of number lines without a context, but problems about opposites, distances, moving around. Some more about contexts with opposites - hours ahead or behind time zones, credits and debts, etc. Which elevation is the highest, which is the lowest. Stuff like that.
One of your fellow Match Corps tutors, an MIT alum named Jon Blum circa 2004, walked his tutee to the stairway landing of the high school's second floor.
"Take 3 steps up." Kid did. "Okay that's positive 3. Come back here to zero. Now take 3 steps down.....that's negative 3."
For that kid, at least, it stuck.
I met him way back! It's amazing how those little things can make a difference at the right moment.