[REBOL] Re: teaching rebol
From: tbrownell:L3TECHNOLOGY at: 31-Mar-2003 17:23
I have a 9 year old daughter who keeps bugging me to teach her as well. We
too home school, and are very happy with the results. Both of our daughters
have already skipped a grade, and get straight A's.
Here's an interesting clip from an interview of Marvin Minsky (inventor of
the first LOGO turtle) on home schooling...
In the July 1994 _Communications of the ACM_ there is an interview with
Marvin Minsky (former director of the MIT AI lab, widely considered to be
one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and an occasional
collaborator of Seymour Papert's).
Among other things he says (on page 26):
(Interviewer): ...For an older student in a conservatory, we can imagine
having to study Gregorian chants for a few months before getting any highly
(positive) feedback. But in the case of a five-year-old child learning piano
or composing, we cannot depend only on delayed feedback or abstract
feedback.
Minsky: I'm afraid that's true, at least for most young children, but the
evidence is that many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions
that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler
just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius.
Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last
couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous
amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that
generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very
different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to
me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider
what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old
into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your
7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument
suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds
of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating
children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates
its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do,
than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
Terry
-----Original Message-----s
From: [rebol-bounce--rebol--com] [mailto:[rebol-bounce--rebol--com]]On Behalf Of
Gregg Irwin
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Graham Chiu
Subject: [REBOL] Re: teaching rebol
Hi Graham,
GC> I was thinking of more of a problem solving approach ...
GC> but that may be too hard. Give them a few basics, a
GC> problem to solve and help them thru it. I was thinking
GC> that formal curriculae might be too boring for my 10 year
GC> old... though I guess she manages school okay :)
Thanks for scribing things Graham. My son is 12, and we have a little
girl who's almost 8 (and loves Age of Empires :).
We home-school, as do many of our neighbors. I think a problem solving
approach is exactly the right way to go about it. I have a very crude
Logo dialect which we might put to use. I'll have to do some research
to refresh my memory on some of those things, but I think we could do
something similar, starting with small dialects (for them to work in)
and working our way up to raw REBOL.
-- Gregg