One thing I've noticed teaching young children is that their questions can be considerably more sophisticated than their ability to investigate them. A child might ask an excellent scientific question but lack the language, mathematics or technical skills necessary to pursue it. We often treat those limitations as evidence that the underlying thinking is immature. Perhaps we should distinguish more carefully between the quality of the question and the child's current ability to answer it.
This last point, incidentally, is where I found myself after thinking about how I can 'future proof' young students. The need to ask quality questions is only going to grow.
In the modern climate where it is forbidden to favor gifted students, how do you create a butterfly program without drawing down the wrath of activists?
I love your recommendation: alignment between curiosity, access, and system support the emergence of prodigies. Education seems determined to tamp down the alignment. I do have a story about this though:
The grandeur of the universe’s building process mandates efficiency in the form of collective alignment with the trajectory, and evolution culls those that fail to integrate.
I’ve finally resolved my guilt for working with Owen, a stubbornly resilient first grader, who refused to conform to traditional addition. Each day, the sum of 3 + 4 capriciously skittered into 2 or 6 or 13. To lock him into the curriculum-approved answer, I anchored the sum to a song involving three green and four orange gate-propped pumpkins, whose antics merited heaven. The rhyming narrative corralled the answer to the conventional 7. And Owen cried.
Years later, I came across Owen--now an MIT sophomore--and he asked if I recalled that incident. He explained that I had inadvertently ruined his game. His random answers actually represented various solutions imposed in what’s commonly referred to as clock arithmetic. Instead of counting along a standard number line, he applied the addends to a circle, beginning with 3 and counting 4 ahead. The answer depended on the number of digits he assigned to that day’s clock.
Essentially, I evolutionarily clipped his wings. I accept that selective paring incurs a cost—in this case, Owen’s prodigious mathematical exploration. But had I allowed his freedom, I might have limited his access to the math reasoning of his later instructors and peers, effectively isolating him in his own mathematical playground, brilliant but unreachable.
One thing I've noticed teaching young children is that their questions can be considerably more sophisticated than their ability to investigate them. A child might ask an excellent scientific question but lack the language, mathematics or technical skills necessary to pursue it. We often treat those limitations as evidence that the underlying thinking is immature. Perhaps we should distinguish more carefully between the quality of the question and the child's current ability to answer it.
This last point, incidentally, is where I found myself after thinking about how I can 'future proof' young students. The need to ask quality questions is only going to grow.
In the modern climate where it is forbidden to favor gifted students, how do you create a butterfly program without drawing down the wrath of activists?
I love your recommendation: alignment between curiosity, access, and system support the emergence of prodigies. Education seems determined to tamp down the alignment. I do have a story about this though:
The grandeur of the universe’s building process mandates efficiency in the form of collective alignment with the trajectory, and evolution culls those that fail to integrate.
I’ve finally resolved my guilt for working with Owen, a stubbornly resilient first grader, who refused to conform to traditional addition. Each day, the sum of 3 + 4 capriciously skittered into 2 or 6 or 13. To lock him into the curriculum-approved answer, I anchored the sum to a song involving three green and four orange gate-propped pumpkins, whose antics merited heaven. The rhyming narrative corralled the answer to the conventional 7. And Owen cried.
Years later, I came across Owen--now an MIT sophomore--and he asked if I recalled that incident. He explained that I had inadvertently ruined his game. His random answers actually represented various solutions imposed in what’s commonly referred to as clock arithmetic. Instead of counting along a standard number line, he applied the addends to a circle, beginning with 3 and counting 4 ahead. The answer depended on the number of digits he assigned to that day’s clock.
Essentially, I evolutionarily clipped his wings. I accept that selective paring incurs a cost—in this case, Owen’s prodigious mathematical exploration. But had I allowed his freedom, I might have limited his access to the math reasoning of his later instructors and peers, effectively isolating him in his own mathematical playground, brilliant but unreachable.