I remote teach maths to an eight-year old home-schooled girl who lives the other side of the mountains. Let's say her name is Beth.
Beth is a delightful girl with a great sense of humour, full of sparkle, fun and mischief but not so full of maths. She is not "girl-ish" i.e. is not all about clothes and dolls. She treats me (and I try to treat her) as an equal albeit her teacher. In anything other than maths we get on remarkably well.
She has a constant undercurrent of fun, machinations, anecdotes that hardly gives her time to engage in simple maths. And yet she is not numerically clueless - often it seems that a maths question or method I pose is either beneath her dignity to comment on, or else after a short pause she concludes "I don't know". Period. No matter how I turn the concept around, once she has decided it is too hard that's it. So I quickly change the subject hoping so doing to re-engage her attention...
It is not a secret that I am struggling with my Christian "faith". But I am still open for input; searching if you will. Struggling, but not given up. I find my own experience is not dissimilar to Beth's. I'm reading the book of Ezekiel at the moment (as one does) and have got to his temple vision. What does this mean, what relevance has it for me? I try commentaries and search the internet and nothing that I find helps my understanding appreciably. Along with many other things I again have to admit to myself: "I don't know". Even as I write these words I can picture Beth's face as she utters these words - two trains of thought: this one stops there point blank, the other continues as if nothing untoward has occurred - like, "what's this under my desk?" (she pulls out and starts to play with a ball of Blue-Tack) or "I'm going to give you a surprise" (get's paper and pencil and shifts the camera so that I cannot she her writing) - minutes pass and eventually she holds up her priceless work of art... Her latest taunt is "maths is so boring".
I've come to love Beth - the maths question, however, remains unanswered.
Really hard to get traction when you are not there! In fact, difficult enough when present - there's a skill in keeping kid's attention which I don't appear to have personally but which I have witnessed. I'm ok dealing with people that want to learn! You might check out https://www.reflexmath.com/, Jude's school uses this, its certainly not a complete answer but harnesses the instinct every human seems to have to spend endless time on very simple repetitive games...
ReplyDeleteHave you read C S Lewis' "Reflections on the Psalms"?
A long time ago I read enough to have it explained how Jewish poetry works in duplets as opposed to our rhymes. But perhaps I should read it again. As for Beth, I have stopped teaching her pending a review next school year (Sept)
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