Several months ago I stumbled upon a YouTube series of videos that followed a family living in the mountains of somewhere in Eastern Europe. It was a remote place, and the way of life there was markedly unlike our modern American life. This family heated their house and cooked on a wood-fueled stove, which the mother of the family started every morning.
I also start our woodstove every morning, so I was interested to see how she did it. She used a small stick that she shaved into a firestarter by splitting it very finely with a big knife all on one end.
It looked like a serious drag to have to do that every morning.
I start our woodstove using the kids' old math books (thin paper that catches easily), torn-up Amazon delivery boxes, and kindling my boys split for me.
19 comments:
Oh no, not the math books! 😀
I hate how there are so many partial pages and covers that the teachers send home at the end if the school year. I'm glad you're putting them to good use!
We start our fires with egg cartons and sheets of the local weekly newspaper. (And kindling my husband splits.)
Having taught math workbooks, I know the quality varies. Starting fires with the unused pages is a valid purpose for some workbook pages!
And I'm over here with no woodeto e and a.gas fireplace. I push a button and instant fire 🙂
I love gas fireplaces. If I ever have a modern heated house so that I don't really need the heat from a woodstove, I would definitely have a gas fireplace.
Me too. It makes me crazy, and burning it in the woodstove in our house, rather than having to haul it to the dump or in the burn pit outside, makes me feel a little better.
My children love burning their old math. This math curriculum (Eureka math) deserves to be burned, in my opinion. :-)
No newspaper here. Just lots of old math.
Please disregard my somewhat unhinged spelling. I was typing while holding my phone in one hand and feeding the baby in the middle of the night.
Carla G: Props to you for being coherent enough to type anything during a middle-of-the-night feeding.
Oh I actually like Eureka except for the consumable aspect (she says with some chagrin knowing liking math at all is a little weird) and if you need a helper it's fine to email me. :) — Karen.
Karen.: Ah, but you are A Math Person, in that you enjoy math and it probably intuitively makes sense to you. So far as I can tell, only Math People like Eureka Math, which makes sense, since it was written by Math People. Non-Math People--which is pretty much my whole family--really, really dislike Eureka Math. I can do it, and so can the majority of my kids, but I don't like it.
As a math person, now I need to go research Eureka math to see what the fuss is about. Please not common core - if so I will join in your dislike.
I mean, that's true. The reason I like it is that the point of Eureka (from purely a parent standpoint, but a Math Person parent) is to show a bunch of methods so that eventually the kids go out into the universe equipped to solve problems. Chances are they won't be needing to necessarily solve math problems, but having the tools to look at different sides of problems is a leg up in a lot of situations.
Now, a math teacher worth his/her salt will be like — here are all these ways. Pick the one that makes the most sense to you and turn in your homework. But unfortunately that's not always how it works.
We learned recently that in an administration change at our school, teachers had very little training in using the Eureka stuff before they were called upon to teach it, and oof, that's absolutely not ideal.
— Karen.
Karen.: Yes, I do appreciate that the curriculum acknowledges different methods of solving problems. But making every kid do every method is awful, and that is what happens. My kids, for instance, dread lessons that require "the arrow way" of solving. But maybe it makes sense to another kid, so everyone has to try it, especially in the younger grades. This pretty much ensures that only Math People, who, as I said, have an intuitive understanding of math, will understand all the methods. And that means almost every student will be forced to do lessons that they hate and don't understand. Eureka Math is trying to make everyone have this sort of deep understanding, which is, in my opinion, unnecessary and frustrating. It's okay if we just do the "standard alogrithm" for dividing fractions! It will still allow them to get to the answer without the distributive property!
mbmom11: Yes, it is Common Core.
Yeah, I think that there's a big difference between "here's all the ways to do this, pick one" and "here's all the ways to do this, let's master them and test" — I'm not a fan of the second, and clearly that's a factor in Eureka teaching. I absolutely do not think you have to understand all methods. I like the way of learning to think that "hm, let's try a different way" is valid, but that's not what happens in practice.
I am a genuinely bad teacher, probably because I don't like the ponderous part of proving, and making kids prove, you are putting educational theory into practice.
Also, riffing on that specific example, I've long thought that although there's a through line with things like the distributive property, in a long-view, general way, around 90 percent of kids will never make that link. Is it worth teaching it as such and mixing it in with things like fractions? I will never know, but I doubt it.
— Karen.
Could you share the YouTube that you watched? It sounds interesting.
I don't really recommend it, because after watching a few of the videos, it started to seem sort of fake to me. Like originally it was just a family in an unspecified remote village, but then it became a Ukrainian village and the comments were filled with people wanting to send them money. But it was this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA_epmfgmy4
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