The Times Table by Robert Frost
More than halfway up the pass
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
His mare was sure to observe the spot
By cramping the wheel on a water-bar,
turning her forehead with a star,
And straining her ribs for a monster sigh;
To which the farmer would make reply,
'A sigh for every so many breath,
And for every so many sigh a death.
That's what I always tell my wife
Is the multiplication table of life.'
The saying may be ever so true;
But it's just the kind of a thing that you
Nor I, nor nobody else may say,
Unless our purpose is doing harm,
And then I know of no better way
To close a road, abandon a farm,
Reduce the births of the human race,
And bring back nature in people's place.
Do you remember learning your Multiplication tables? I struggled with them as a child until my Great Aunt Florence (my Grandmother's sister) offered to teach me how to play the piano if I would come study the tables with her daily. That was an offer too good to pass up. Smile. I don't know that I actually ended up learning much about playing the piano, in truth, but I did learn my Multiplication tables and I have wonderful memories of that time -- of G. Aunt Florence's yard, full of apple trees which the neighbor's pony raided regularly, of the pansies that decorated her walk, and of my Uncle Frank, G. Aunt Florence's husband, who cheated at Scrabble...
So now I am in the position of teaching the Multiplication tables to my children. I cannot offer piano lessons as a bribe -- besides the fact that I don't play the piano, my eldest is already quite skilled at the Instrument and my youngest is more interested in learning to play the flute. I have tried computer games like 'Times Attacks' with little success and then I came across a new approach, one that I think might just work. It is taken from the Waldorf schools' approach: I will give the boys 'Main Lesson Books' into which they will create images of their tables. I will find poems about the tables -- perhaps from Schoolhouse Rock? -- which the boys can copy into their MLBs in their very best writing. We will use body math and games to reinforce the tables themselves. I will post images from their books once they have created the pages.
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
His mare was sure to observe the spot
By cramping the wheel on a water-bar,
turning her forehead with a star,
And straining her ribs for a monster sigh;
To which the farmer would make reply,
'A sigh for every so many breath,
And for every so many sigh a death.
That's what I always tell my wife
Is the multiplication table of life.'
The saying may be ever so true;
But it's just the kind of a thing that you
Nor I, nor nobody else may say,
Unless our purpose is doing harm,
And then I know of no better way
To close a road, abandon a farm,
Reduce the births of the human race,
And bring back nature in people's place.
Do you remember learning your Multiplication tables? I struggled with them as a child until my Great Aunt Florence (my Grandmother's sister) offered to teach me how to play the piano if I would come study the tables with her daily. That was an offer too good to pass up. Smile. I don't know that I actually ended up learning much about playing the piano, in truth, but I did learn my Multiplication tables and I have wonderful memories of that time -- of G. Aunt Florence's yard, full of apple trees which the neighbor's pony raided regularly, of the pansies that decorated her walk, and of my Uncle Frank, G. Aunt Florence's husband, who cheated at Scrabble...
So now I am in the position of teaching the Multiplication tables to my children. I cannot offer piano lessons as a bribe -- besides the fact that I don't play the piano, my eldest is already quite skilled at the Instrument and my youngest is more interested in learning to play the flute. I have tried computer games like 'Times Attacks' with little success and then I came across a new approach, one that I think might just work. It is taken from the Waldorf schools' approach: I will give the boys 'Main Lesson Books' into which they will create images of their tables. I will find poems about the tables -- perhaps from Schoolhouse Rock? -- which the boys can copy into their MLBs in their very best writing. We will use body math and games to reinforce the tables themselves. I will post images from their books once they have created the pages.
And it might help if you show them that multiplying and dividing --- and subtracting -- numbers are all functions of addition. So all they really need to do is to learn to add really really well, and then sort of stand the process on its head in several different ways to achieve the desired result. Probably works best to turn subtraction into addition. Then you can show them how multiplication is just a form of addition -- and then comes division, which may not be so obviously derived from addition, but they are clever enough to show you how that is the case.
ReplyDeleteTurns out that I am planning to use a combination of the Waldorf approach -- which teaches all the processes at once (whole to parts) and Rightstart which teaches them to use the Abacus.
ReplyDelete