Re: Paul Lockhart's book reviewed in the L.A. Times!

From: tschibasch <tschibasch_at_yahoo.com_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:06:01 -0000

Paul's book arrived in the mail yesterday. I ordered it through Amazon. I look forward to reading it soon.

Many decades ago, foreign language was taught like mathematics; there were many excruciating exercises, dreadful drills, and mournful memorizations of irregular verbs...

This approach does work, though many people may drop out along the way. I am convinced there is no "one size fits all" method to teaching. Some people need drills, others need to write everything down, or make flash cards. Some people create funny poems that embed the information - that is a good trick for memorization!

I believe that learning can be fun. Yes, there has to be work involved; but if it's fun, we look forward to doing it, instead of putting it off. We also do better when we enjoy what we are doing.

For myself, it was at UCLA that I ultimately dropped mathematics and went for a major in linguistics. It happened innocently enough: I needed to study a foreign language so I could read foreign technical papers. Either German or Russian were recommended. I took both. As I took these courses, I suddenly found something that I loved doing. A strange thing, looking forward to school! But it happened. I then took Arabic. Then Japanese. Mathematics by that point seemed boring and pointless...

Interesting how linguistics is not very different from mathematics in many respects. Had the subjects been taught with different approaches, I might well have stayed the course. I cannot say.


John


P.S. I never took Esperanto or Klingon at UCLA. These came later. ;-)


--- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "Rin Watt" <katecwatt@...> wrote:
>
> Does practice have to be so miserable?
>
> When I give grammer exercises, yes, there are rules and they have to learn them, but I make it fun by writing sample sentences about zombies and shark attack. English doesn't have to be mind-numbingly boring, and if Paul's book is to be believed, math doesn't either.
>
> Were I to be attacked by zombies, I would distract them from their fell intent by describing a particularly sanguinary shark attack.
>
> (OK, I could never use something quite so rococo, but almost.) ;-)
>
> Rin
>
Received on 2009-04-16 10:13:10