Re: Quisanaut? Cuisinaut? huh?

the Omrud biomed:
>Peter Moylan typed thus:
 
>> For a minute there I thought this was a reference to Cuisenaire, a
>> method of teaching primary school mathematics that was briefly
>> popular in about 1960.
>> 
>> My sister, the only one in the family to have suffered through this
>> fad, used to think it was called "poison air".
>
>Not suffered, at least in my case.  In my school, it was used only to 
>stretch those with advanced maths abilities, to demonstrate the use 
>of bases other than base-10.  I learned to do base-8 (and base-6) 
>arithmetic at the age of 9 - this may have laid the pattern of my 
>later career.

At my sister's school it was all the children - of about 5 or 6 years
old, as I recall it - and with a teacher who possibly didn't see the
point.  I can see that useful things could have been done with the
rods _after_ learning basic arithmetic, but having to learn things
like 'green + green = red', with the hope that the children will later
deduce from this that 1+1=2, was an exercise in futility.

I still believe that my sister could have become good at arithmetic
if it hadn't been for Cuisenaire.  I get very annoyed at educational
fads that attempt to introduce the abstract ahead of the concrete.
Children's minds don't work that way.

-- 
Peter Moylan                 peter at ee dot newcastle dot edu dot au
http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au
(OS/2 and eCS information and software)