Constructing the Universe

Michael Schneider's book Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science, A Voyage from 1 to 10 reveals the symbolic in the everyday. I've used this book in years past with children as young as 6 and with a wide range of ages within a single math class. It is practical and profound at the same time, as numbers are.

In the last year, Michael opened a classroom in San Anselmo. I recently arranged a class for students grades 6 through 9 there.

lesson: life and death

Completing the circle of life and death. This is an important article for life long learning. Covers how we age, how we make medical and life/death decisions, relationship to our parents.

http://www.katybutler.com/slowmedicine/index.html

What A Helicopter Instructor Could Teach ... via Sam Smith prorev.com

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/06/13/teaching-teachers/

Another treasure from the enewsletter of Sam Smith's Progressive Review (http://www.prorev.com/)

About the importance of one-on-one teaching and the difficulties of lecture classes.

Gotta go ...

Inventing Math

Math query - surveying the factors that could determine a canon

At any point, along your learning life, it is legitimate to ask: What is my relationship to this subject or question? The answer touches upon your history, your assumptions, your talents, your tendencies.

Then match the response to the proposed lesson or course or the larger canon.

A few years ago I taught a math class to a group of children ages 6 - 13. One of the texts that inspired this class was Michael S. Schneider's Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science: A Voyage from 1 to 10.

Michael has recently opened a classroom in a nearby town. Next week we will have a workshop there with kids in grades 6 - 9. In pulling the group together, we queried the parents, What do you hope to get out of this? What are your math interests?

It's interesting to read the responses. (The names are made up.):

James hasn't been doing much formal math recently. But he loves building with legos - he looks at shapes (vehicles, buildings etc) and tries to reconstruct in legos. He also does woodworking. And he really likes working with a compass - making shapes like mandalas and coloring them. ****************************** Lisa has been doing some work with the compass - in line with the Waldorf curriculum - and loves it. She has done work exploring circles, triangles, and quadrilaterals and dividing a circle into 6 equal divisions. That is where we are at the moment. We are currently working on Pythagoras in our Greek studies, so I thought we would do inscribing a pentagon and the Golden Ratio maybe next week. ***************************** And for my own children, I wrote:

I think the emphasis should be on construction. I want that for my two. I am hoping SC will find inspiration to go deeper and resurrect his drawing interests. He enjoyed our visit there. SC loves working on paper with the compass. He loves looking at math in nature. He liked the model of the plant growth.

SE has been taking two art classes recently. I found out today she's drawn to the work of Maxfield Parrish. She sent me some of his posters; they are full of geometric forms.

I am very interested in having SA and SC DO the constructions with the compass. I studied Euclid's Elements in college, then Ptolemy and Copernicus and more. We did lots of constructions and worked as closely with the historical development of the discoveries as possible.

A list of upcoming topics: Required Reading, Ideas, A Canon

Does unfenced learning include required reading? Of course.

What's the difference between an idea and a shadow of an idea?

Name your canon.

Wild and Free

I haven't done what Sam Smith maybe has already done with the words Wild and Free. Smith tracks the use and overuse of words. Used is a good word for what is done with words. Used up. Used without regard.

It seems to be that Wild = Free. And the converse is also true. In this contemporary world of unrootedness, which wants to call itself radical - like a root. The age of uncertainty for sure. And the age of contradictions. I decided last May that Orwell's 1948 essay, Politics and the Modern Language, would be required reading for my school.