Here’s an incredibly cool place to go in the future for those of you lucky enough to live in NYC. It’s the Museum of Mathematics. I can already feel my inner nerd jumping up and down with excitement and envy. Seriously, why didn’t someone think of this when I was a kid? We in America decry the lowering math scores and how we’re losing our competitive edge in science and math to other countries, and we don’t really do enough to make science and math fun for kids. A zillion dollars going to boost standardized test prep and all the debate in the world about national standards aren’t going to be nearly as useful as making intellectual pursuits fun for kids. Why? Because at the end of the day, unless a kid has fun doing something, he or she is not going to motivated to continue growing their brains outside of the classroom. What’s sad is that it wasn’t until 2009 that this museum was actually chartered. They plan on opening their doors in 2012, but in the meanwhile they have a traveling exhibition: Math Midway. We need more places like this and we need to make places like this grow and succeed.

Sometimes kids are smarter than we give them credit for. According to this, when kids with learning disabilities are allowed to solve math problems on their own terms, in their own intuitive ways, they often figure out ways to do it that may not be “by the book”, but still arrive at the correct answer nonetheless.

“A study by Dr Lio Moscardini, in Strathclyde’s Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, found that children deal better with arithmetical problems if they can use their own intuitive strategies such as using number blocks, drawings or breaking an equation up into smaller, simpler parts- rather than being instructed in arithmetical facts and procedures.”

For example:

• Answering a question about how many children are on a bus after a group gets on by representing two sets of children with cubes, drawings or fingers and joining the sets together
• Splitting up the sum 48 + 25 by adding 40 to 20, then adding eight and five separately for the total of 73
• Using context and language and modifying the way a problem is phrased. In one question, a boy having 14 stickers and giving six away was changed to him giving away “six of his stickers,” allowing a pupil to follow the language of the problem to make sense of it

Often times we try to teach kids the “right” way to do things, and we don’t listen or pay attention to what their inner workings are and how they actually think. We are doing our best to impart our own hard earned wisdom, but if our two thinking modalities clash, then it can lead to nothing but frustration on both sides. This study was about kids with developmental disabilities, but I’ll bet that this idea can carry over to all kinds of children in general. Reminds me of a saying that I particularly like and often remind myself when I deal with people at work:

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – George S. Patton

I am not a native English speaker.  Technically speaking, English is my second language and the language of my birth is Korean.  When I first came to the US, I spent a great deal of time and effort learning to speak, read, and write the language – so much so that now in my head, I think in English, so I guess you can call it the language of my thoughts.  During these early years, I spent a great deal of time just copying books – learning to write in a script that I had vaguely learned in kindergarten in Korea,  but now would become the centerpiece of everything I write.  Part of this practice was spent in developing my penmanship.  I actually spent a good deal of time learning penmanship.  This is probably something anyone learning English as a second language probably went through at some point or another, and I used to use template books with pages similar to that featured above to perfect my handwriting.  And it helped.  I also remember specific handwriting exercises given out as homework by our first and second grade teachers that made us do the same thing I was doing at home just trying to learn the language.  I think (and I’m dating myself here) back in the early 80’s, it was still considered important enough of a subject that it was taught in school.

It doesn’t seem like so anymore.

I have friends with kids who go to elementary school now and rarely are there classes, lessons, or even teachers who instruct in penmanship.  Penmanship is probably a subject matter that probably gets crowded out by more “relevant subjects” for the 21^st century, like computer literacy and the internet.  But handwriting is actually, in my humble opinion, an art form, something that can help center your thoughts and something that’s beautiful in and of itself.  And it seems like there’s actually neurologically beneficial reasons for practicing penmanship and handwriting in general.  According to this article, kids who write more by hand seem to develop their neural activity more and can (one hopes) lead the kids developing their intelligence more than those who do not write by hand as much.  Incidentally, this loss of penmanship is not an American phenomenon.  In China, too, there is an increasing loss of handwriting capability as more and more people use texting and keyboard type devices to communicate.  And this is the culture that invented calligraphy, where the entire point of the art is the penmanship.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite bemoaning the rise of computers and mobile telecom devices.  But what I am saying is that there are some fundamental skills that can get loss in the shuffle to educate ourselves – and out children – to prepare for the more technologically advanced century.  Certain things are fundamental because they are so important to personal development.  Take a look at letters from the Colonial period, or even the Civil War, or heck, even as recent as WW2.  We often talk about the loss of good, classical education (you know, the kind where you weren’t considered educated until you can speak Latin and Greek, and have read everything from Plato to Dickens, etc).  The handwriting of old display a sense of sophistication and class, at least to us, that to them, was probably as common as writing down a grocery list.  And now there’s scientific evidence that some of these older styles of instructions are actually proven to be beneficial.

Well, Junior, I know by the time you go to school it’ll be the mid 2010s, and you’ll probably have neural interfaces to computers by the time you can vote, but if I have anything to say about, you’re going to learn to write well, not just in content but also in physical form.  I think the model to aspire to is Thomas Jefferson.  He was chosen to be scribe of the Declaration of Independence not just because he was a great wordsmith, but he could actually write in a beautiful handwriting.