Month: October 2011
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Why build a site that teaches children to read?
Or: why am I spending over a year of my life developing a reading tutorial for little kids? You might think such a question invites boring platitudes of the sort that afflicts a lot of writing about education. Well, I’ll try not to bore you. With my academic training and a background developing collaborative websites,…
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Reading Bear launches!
All, after a lot of planning and even more work, Reading Bear is now live on ReadingBear.org. We are launching with 14 presentations, averaging around 15 minutes per presentation–in the longest of seven versions; there is an automatically-generated quiz with every presentation and an automatically-generated review every five presentations. There are various other features and…
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The “times-are-changing, specific-knowledge-is-unnecessary” canard
I don’t know how many times I have read, “The world, and research findings, are changing so fast that it is pointless to insist on learning particular bits of knowledge. Much of it will be outdated soon. So the only really important thing to teach children is how to think.” This is dangerous nonsense. It…
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Unobvious concepts that are important, but rarely taught
To understand history, geography, fiction, and a whole lot else besides, it is fairly important that children be taught in considerable depth certain practical yet universal concepts about history that, I think, are rarely explained in much very depth: Gathering (as in “hunting and gathering”) Animal skins (and tanning) Nomadic life Shepherding, spinning, weaving, dyeing…