Star Sense & Mindfulness

The dark night sky twinkled back at me more than I am used to this evening.  We are far from big cities. My mind wasn't on how many more stars I am seeing than when in NJ or Philly, but on how many exist all together.  

I attended a Singapore Math night at our kids school this evening.  Parents were led through each grade, K-6 and teachers laid out how the curriculum set up a strong "number sense" in each student's mind.  The beauty of the program is in the depth of learning and love of learning that each class is taken through.  It revamped math from the way I learned, how to churn out procedures, to now giving students tools to make the complex simple, with a strong base of familiarity in each problem.  Nurturing students into problem solvers instead of number crunchers. 

And so it must be with our stars. Multitudes hung and named in strategic places.   To the untrained eye, scattered and randomly seen, but to the trained, within orderly constellations reminding us of the current season and position of the earth within the universe. Will we be able to set up an infrastructure of "number sense" within a math curriculum to give our children an edge to begin to fathom the order and precision of the design of the stars? Shall we give them a glimpse of a few stars and teach their names and values and then one day take them to the country where they can see multiples upon multiples?

I'm encouraged by the Singapore Math Curriculum. I'm encouraged by the passion of the Grammar School Dean who ran the evening.  I'm encouraged by the process and potential as I contemplate how our children are trained, inspired, and learn to love to learn.  

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Psalm 8:3-4

Can you sense the mindfulness?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Clouds and Pandemics

Being on-call is like a pandemic in our house.  There is a heated moment when you get to the middle or near-end of a strategy game, especially a game we have, which is actually called Pandemic.  In this game, the world is simulated as having a pandemic outbreak of a disease, and the players are the health team trying to stop the pandemic and find cures.  We don't have an outbreak of disease in our actual household, thank goodness, we have an outbreak of the beeper going off throughout the night when Mike is on-call. Call days are clearly marked on our calendar.  "CALL" is exactly what I write on the top of each day Mike is on call; I dread it, he dreads it.  But it is a day set aside, part of the gig, and patients do not wait until the glossy hours of 9-5 to get sick, so someone has to be available.  We both know this full well, but this does not go without taking a toll on the household. As a wife, it is almost impossible to relax until the call has b...
Read more

Bleach

Image
I had some mysterious stains on a few bibs and dish towels. The first bib where I found these mysterious stains, I put straight bleach on, and then let it sit until I was ready to do a white load, and the bleach proceeded to eat holes in the fabric. Luckily, the lettering stayed in tact to say, "my daddy's a cardiologist." But now I feel bad every time I put the bib on David, because it has holes in it. I can't bring myself to throw it out, unless maybe I replace it one day. If we wear it out of the house now, it might as well say, "my daddy's a cardiologist and my mommy can't wash my laundry." Let's not do that again. So I tried again with some more bibs and dishtowels. I put them in a bucket of water, with some bleach added. (The stains were not that mysterious, they were moldy stains.) Grown from neglect and moisture, buried in either a bag, the bottom of the stroller, the car, or the bottom of a hamper. My first bib goes into the...
Read more

Checking Pockets

While sorting through fresh pile laundry, I noticed a little midnight blue splotch here and there.  As I pull up more and more clothes to fold, there is not just a little splotch here and there, but streaks, huge splotches, whole white toddler collars turned to a tie-died blue-fest.  My C Wonder shirt that I wear weekly no longer has crisp thin navy lines over white, but blue and white meddled together as if to portray an overcast day's sky.  Now, rather than pulling for clothes to fold, I'm digging for the culprit while I intermittently spew out questions.  "Was there anything in your pocket from school this week? Did you happen to stick a crayon in your pocket?  Or one of those gel writers? Do you remember putting anything in your pocket? What could this be?"  The response is a stream of "no. no. no." Then, as if clarity hit, "Mommy, maybe a long, long time ago someone had something in their pocket and you forgot to check the pocket and then you wa...
Read more