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Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#32[deleted]
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#33This is wonderful. My wife homeschools, and the math curriculum she uses uses a very similar method from the beginning. My daughter knows "12" as "One-ten two" and "33" as "three-ten three" and says it that way. She also knows those mean twelve and thirty-three, but for the purposes of the math program she uses the place terminology. We can only hope that it will give her a better understanding of what's going on tha…
I'm very very interested in considering homeschooling. How did the article's method differ with your child, since the "class size" is reduced to one? Your child won't have the benefit of being "filled in", but maybe she feels that she owns 100% of the achievement? By the way, "one-ten-two" and "three-ten-thee" is literally how the Chinese would pronounce their numbers (一十二，三十三）. In a way I think it's helped me unders…
The Socratic method can be frustrating with one child, because when she doesn't get it, she really doesn't get it, and it takes a lot of questioning to lead her down the right path again. Sometimes you just want to bang your head against the wall when you ask the simplest leading question and she gets it wrong. At least with a group most of the kids will get those questions right.
I think my wife and I use that teaching method quite naturally. I'm never inclined to just give our children the answer; they only learn when they arrive at the answer themselves.
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#34[deleted]
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#35I love to learn using the Socratic method. One of my favorite books is: "The Little Schemer" which is great and twists my mind in ways that I didn't think where possible. Anyway do you know of other books, on any topic, that use the socratic method?
Many Plato's dialogues are a great read; Eutyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Protagoras, the Sophist, the Symposium, Phaedrus, the Republic...
As a side note, having read (and re-read) all of Plato's dialogues and many from Xenophon, Socrat became incredibly real and life-like to me. Xenophon's dialogues are far from being as good as Plato's, but the Socrat character really is somehow the same.
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#36This is very cool, and I'm going to try it when I can.
But just to nitpick, he did actually tell them plenty of things, it was not just questions.
2 Examples:
> Could it be because we have 10 fingers?
> No, only to you guys, because you were taught it wrong [grin] -- to the aliens it is two. They learn it that way in pre-school just as you learn to call one, zero [pointing to "10"] "ten". But it's not really ten, right? It's two -- if you only had two fingers.
Not a criticism, just a nitpick.
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#37I learned how to count in binary using my fingers as digits probably about third grade. The pinkie is the 1. At that age, I thought it was pretty cool that I could count to 31 on one hand, and it stuck with me to this day. I'm sure I'll teach my son the same.
I taught myself sometime around age 13, because I was playing second flute in a youth orchestra, which meant I had to count out long rests, sometimes over 100 measures. Just counting in my head, I kept getting distracted and losing track.
(I already knew binary, because I was programming on an 8-bit box.)
Re: Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method
#38This gives me an idea. What if there were a virtual university that was entirely conducted via chat? Like Quora meets Convore.
I'm unfamiliar with Quora. How is it different from, say, yahoo answers or stackOverflow??
Quora is of greater intellectual merit than Yahoo Answers, and isn't siloed into verticals like Stack Exchange.