The Entrepreneurial Homeschool, Part 2

Part 1 covered the physical and emotional foundation. The next layer is learning to reason through difficult problems. Part 2: Learning to Think Slowly I challenge them with abstract thinking in its purest form. We call that math, but we usually confuse math with its notation. The syntax and the algorithms are only one aspect of “math”, the way language is only one aspect of a culture. You cannot reduce Japanese culture to the Japanese language, and you cannot reduce math to its symbols. Math is really the exercise of reasoning itself, the workout for the part of the mind that solves problems. The trouble is that math is difficult to teach well, particularly in a classroom that must move many students at one pace. You have to go slow. Like REALLY SLOW. So slow that it’s uncomfortable to most impatient adults. Classrooms do go slow. They just never go slow at the speed of the individual learner. For a given topic, child’s right pace is another child’s crawl. The result is…