everything i needed to know i (should have) learned in third grade

some of the stuff i'm teaching my students i did not figure out on my own until college!

it took endless hours of doing calculus listening to vertical horizon and endless more hours manipulating numbers and units in astronomy and even more endless hours of trial and error and physics problems that took up five pages (front and back) of pure calculus to realize that the best way to learn something is to own it. in other words, you have to figure out your own way of making sense of the information you're given, and you have to build on what you already know. that's what physics was all about for me. i couldn't say how many times my E & M professor repeated this same thing - that the good thing about physics is that if you forget the equation, you can derive it from what you already have.

that's like the root of all learning; in reading, you use what you know before hand to help you understand what you're reading. how are you going to understand a passage about the cosmic microwave background radiation if you first don't have sufficient background knowledge about cosmology? same thing with learning a language - when i was learning spanish (and french) when coming to a word i don't know i first see if it has any roots in it that i recognize, then prefixes or suffixes to help me understand what kind of word it is. i try to make links between the unknown word and words i already know. i've been teaching my students to use what they know in order to help them figure out what they don't know. for example, say you need to find 17 + 23 but obviously you do not know that right off the bat. you know that seven plus three is ten, and then ten and twenty make thirty, so the answer is forty. ok let me make it simpler; we know that 5+5=10 but say we have trouble with 5+7. we know that seven is two more than five so it's ten and two more so it's 12.

so what i didn't learn in third grade i finally figured out in college.

also in my last semester i figured out that i am a visual learner - to understand any process i always have to draw a picture. it took physiology (specifically the respiratory system) to finally put that into words.




p.s. mr. rod blagojevich (sp), how did you donate one million dollars to rebuild a fricking CHURCH? how the hell do you support your claim that you're still respecting the separation of church and state???!