Learning

I am reading this book by Frank Smith all about how we learn and how we forget. It can be a challenging book as it confronts the common held views of how education works and disputes them. But I am enjoying it and it is making a lot of sense that will no doubt help my children as they learn. He states how we need to understand something in order to learn it, not to learn something to understand it. You can take a subject like maths and the reason it can take someone years and years to do the work and still not learn it, is that they have never really understood it in the first place.

I have a friend that autonomously educated her children. This friends background is in maths. She did no formal maths with her children until they were near 14. Before that, she exposed them to maths in every day and wherever the opportunity arose. They also played lots of math based games and mental maths type things. Her children understood maths. Her daughter got an A in the GCSE with only 2 years of formal maths tuition. I hope to learn a lot from her example.