Why Time Passes Faster As We Age ... And How Learning Kinda Makes It Last Longer

Early Learning Early Learning General Discussions
1

So, I’m in favor of early learning, clearly, and think that the sooner a child can start reading books the more information their minds will have to attach memories to.

… I came across these videos while looking up memory and found them quite interesting. Hope you enjoy.

Here is the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-E9MMTciBo&feature=related

Here is the summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2tBkzxEw0g&feature=channel&list=UL

By the way, how the summary’s put together is interesting too.

I appreciated the notion that we should be teaching our children HOW to think before we teach them WHAT to think. What do you think? Hmm?

2

I enjoyed these videos. Nothing new to me but still a great refresher and from a different persons viewpoint too.
So about the kiddies. Well I don’t actually think we should teach them HOW to learn FIRST. But i definately think it should be taught sooner than it is. In Australia it is introduced in math around grade 3 and in other subjects even later…I am thinking university in some cases. Bt if you are lucky your kids can get taught these strategies earlier…but the earliest I have ever seen is grade 2. Wonder what the rest of the world is like?
So why not first? Well simply because the HOW to learn strategies are left brain thinking which doesn’t become active until at least age 4 ( 4-6 in most kids I personally have dealt with, a few later cases and a number of bright kids turn left earlier, age 3) so if we are teaching them how to think it is closing our window for the teaching them WHAT faster. So I figure use the open right brain window, develop it fully, fill it with info then around age 3/4 start to get them thinking and puzzling through ideas and using logic.
Decide when to teach them HOW to think based on need. Which i would say most EL kids would need around age 4. Perhaps a bit earlier if the read a lot of non fiction. Normal kids need it around the second year of school, as generally in the first year of school kids arnt expected to draw many conclusions, and if they did it wouldn’t really effect their scores/results/education.
Even this way it’s still at least 2 years more of quality thinking techniques. Probably many more in most cases as I would suggest many people never learn these memory and thinking strategies at all.

3

Thanks for posting - I’ll be sure to watch the videos. I may have read an article by this guy at one time, but not sure.

As to why time passes faster - without watching the videos, my opinion has been along these lines: diminishing percentage of a unit of time in relation to total experience.

When you’re one year old, a year is an entire lifetime, literally. 1/1 or 100%
When you’re 100 years old, a year is only 1% of a lifetime, 1/100 or 1%. The passage of this year therefore seems so much faster than it would as a one year old. Between these two, you’d have progressively smaller and smaller percentages as you age, making it seem like time is accelerating. But, it’s nothing but a psychological trick based on accumulated life experience.

4

I am for teaching my kid WHAT right now as opposed to HOW.
He is only 2.5. We read a lot and talk about a lot of things. He sometimes asks questions and he draws his own conclusions on a few things. But even those things are something that he has a lot of content knowledge about. I believe right now, in what I call the sponge years, the more content I can teach him the more foreknowledge he will have when he gets to an age where he can independently start figuring out why.

PokerDad. That is exactly what I came up with when I was a kid/teen as I realised each year went by faster than the one before. It is all about the percentage of your lifetime.

5

Of course there exceptions to every rule, but I like the trivium method of teaching. For those unfamiliar with the classical model, the trivium stands for is Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and they are stages of learning. In a nutshell,

The grammer stage of learning is for 6-10 year-olds, and grammar refers to getting a knowledge base in all subjects, not just language. Bits of intelligence are a perfect example of “grammar” learning. The “what to think”.

The logic stage is for 11-14 year-olds, and it focuses on drawing logical conclusions with the knowledge we have aquired. It’s probably the “how to think”. It’s hard to come to a logical conclusion about what animal would be at the top of a given food chain if you don’t know anything about the animals or their habitat. Of course, logic comes in much earlier in a child’s education, but 11-14 is the time to focus in on the ability to think logically.

The rhetoric stage is for 15-18 year-olds. I’m going to call it the “Why to think” stage. This is where the student has a solid foundation in their education, and they can now focus on how they can use that education to become a beneficial member of society.

So that’s the Trivium, and I like it. I haven’t quite decided how it will fit into our EL education. I remember Susan Wise Bauer (A Trivium proponent) saying in a lecture that I went to that it isn’t hard to give a student a superb education, and she has seen many, many 7-year-olds with the book smarts of the typical 11-year-old. However, there is also a certain kind of maturity that only happens when they have been around the sun so many times. I’ve seen that in my 5-year-old. He’s on a 4th-grade reading level, but he is not interested in reading what most 9-year-olds have the attention span to read. He wants to read the books that were designed to be read to a 5-year-old. He isn’t any more mature then any of the other 5-year-olds in our neighborhood, even if he does have a broader vocabulary.

I also believe that when indoctrination happens in schools, it is because the Trivium isn’t followed. It is harder to indoctrinate a child that has been taught grammar and logic, but if you can teach rhetoric to a 6-year-old, you can build more followers to your way of thinking. No education is completely free of indoctrination, nor is that necessarily a bad thing, but I believe that leaders are made from more closely following the trivium model.

Just my two cents. Right now I’m focusing on the grammar stage of learning, although we do lots of puzzles in preparation for the logic stage to come.