[IAEP] educational brew

[Maria Droujkova]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 5:03 AM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To benefit from a given lesson, one must master any prerequisites.

The good news is that as time goes on, people (slowly) develop ways to
help kids acquire prerequisites within learning new topics. For
example, you can build lessons about proportionality on
multiplication, which you can build on addition, which you can build
on counting. Alternatively, you can work with unfair sharing,
growth/shadows/perspective and other similarity, or intensive unit
(e.g. speed) metaphors directly, incorporating development of
multiplicative reasoning and its coordination with additive reasoning
into this work. As the culture progresses, math gets more and more
"packed," prerequisites and all.

I found Bill's non-universals summary to be quite useful in thinking
about these issues, especially the "similarities over differences"
part http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals As we figure
out to help kids work with similarities in deeper ways, and as we
uncover better metaphors for similarities, prerequisites get subsumed
into other topics.

-- 
Cheers,
MariaD

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