Is This The Party To Whom I’m Speaking?

In the generations before social media-texting and whatnot-students passed “notes.” Notes were, as the name implies, pieces of paper on which messages were transcribed. In those halcyon days, “I’m going to kick your ass after school at Burger King” was about as literate a message as you were likely to receive.

One of our group, “Steve” (Steve is his real name, but for reasons that will become glaringly apparent, I don’t think he reads my blog) would correct our furtive missives. Steve had an actual red pencil and a highly developed relationship with grammar. Woe to the unfortunate individual who penned, “Theirs going to be a fight, who are you rooting for?” Steve would circle “Theirs” and write “There is.” Then he would write “RUN ON” in capital letters as if her were solving a capital crime. If he were in a particularly expansive mood, he would explain objective case pronouns: “For whom are you going to root?” he would write in large red print. “You are going to root for ‘HIM’ so ‘WHOM’ is correct.”

It will come as no surprise that Steve himself was frequently the objective pronoun in these skirmishes.

I liked Steve, perhaps not surprisingly in that I spent much of those same years trying to perfect an algorithm for multiplying three-digit numbers together in my head. It wasn’t until some decades later that a dear friend had the grace to point out, “Nobody likes the math thing.”

Point taken. And although I didn’t get that particular memo until I was in my early thirties, it could have been worse. I might not have learned that nobody is interested in how to square numbers that end in five until much later.*

Lev Vygotsky talked about a “zone of proximal development” as the distance between what a child can do on her own and what she can do with help from adults. Stay with me here. “The zone of proximal development defines functions that have not matured yet, but are in a process of maturing, that will mature tomorrow, that are currently in an embryonic state; these functions could be called the buds of development, the flowers of development, rather than the fruits of development, that is, what is only just maturing” (Vygotsky, 1935.)

I think of the zone of proximal development as “You can’t learn any Swedish from listening to people speak Swedish unless you already know some Swedish.”

Just hearing Swedish isn’t learning Swedish. And if you do speak some Swedish, going back to “Hi, Sven. Where is the library?” won’t help either. Learning is about scaffolding-taking the next step based on a firm foundation of what you already know. A 20 word Swedish sentence in which you know 19 of the words may very well help teach you the 20th word. A 20 word Swedish sentence of which you know none of the words won’t teach you anything. Except possibly to hate learning Swedish.

That Gary Larson Cartoon about what the man says to the dog and what the dog hears? That’s zone of proximal development.

Because that dog isn’t learning anything.

Much of what goes on in classrooms across our country is kids hating learning because they don’t know what’s going on. (Imagine yourself in that room with all those nice Swedish folks speaking Swedish and you don’t understand a word.)

Most people can’t go from algebra one class straight through to pre-calculus. Most students need to take algebra two after algebra one THEN take the more advanced class.

Your children can’t run before they can walk. They can’t benefit from advanced instruction before they understand the lessons leading up to it. And most importantly, if children aren’t OPEN to learning, then they won’t. The issue of motivation may be an advanced question, but I feel pretty strongly that nobody ever learned how to avoid “who/whom” errors from looking at Steve’s scrawled letters.

First Year College Student: Excuse me, can you tell me where the library is at?

Pretentious Senior: At this university, we do not end our sentences with a preposition.

First Year College Student: Okay. Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?

Before you try to teach your children anything, ask yourself the following question: are you modeling a love of learning or are you just showing off how much you know?

You’re kids, no matter whom they are, will know there parents’s reasonings.

* In the unlikely eventuality that I am mistaken, here is a link to B. Lee Clay’s wonderful website:

http://mathforum.org/k12/mathtips/beatcalc.html

Here you can learn how to square numbers in your head and much more.If, as a result of knowing “the math thing” you end up going on fewer dates, don’t say I didn’t warn you.