On 3 Nov 2004 04:22:31 GMT, peter@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Peter
Moylan) wrote:
>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.
>
We had them. I don't recall anything useful about them except that
they were fun for building log forts out of. The little white ones
were a pain.
--
Richard Bollard
Canberra, Australia
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