Remembering Iapetus
Iapetus was a Titan, the son of Uranus by Gaea, the Greek Earth goddess. More importantly, for my purposes, it is the name geologists have given a vast ocean that existed from 500 million years ago to 400 million years ago. As to my purposes - I want to talk about elementary education.
I've mentioned before that I don't approve of the horror modern elementary education has for memorization. There is probably some basis to it. I was of the generation that learned how to compute square roots by hand, and pretty nasty work it was too, the more so because we really had no idea what we were doing, merely cycling through some memorized steps - understanding that algorithm takes a bit of calculus, and we hadn't studied algebra yet. Of course calculators made such skills obsolete, like the algorithms for long division, and even multiplication and addition of multi-digit numbers. The reaction to this overemphasis on rote memorization has, as usual, been an over-reaction to the extent that even learning the multiplication tables has been deprecated. I think this is based on an underappreciation of the role that memory plays in thought.
Which brings me back to Iapetus. One of the great geological detective stories is that of the unravelling of the history of this ocean that perished before the first vertebrates walked on land. This story is a major focus of Richard Fortey's book Earth: An Intimate History. The mountain ranges resulting from the extinction of this ocean stretch across much of Eastern North America and Westernmost Europe (The Appalachians, The Caledonides of Scotland, Wales, and Norway). The strata of these mountains present an almost incomprehensible jumble, compressed, folded, older rocks pushed on top of younger not once but many times, scrambled, cooked in the depths of the Earth and brought forth again by 400 million years of erosion. The elucidation of the mystery is the story of a great idea, tectonic plates, but even more the story of generations of patient mapping and detective work.
Fortey describes John Dewey, one of the elucidators:
Our memories are never better than they were in our childhood. Kids need to be acquiring knowledge: facts, figures, and algorithms. For most kids, it's even fun.
I've mentioned before that I don't approve of the horror modern elementary education has for memorization. There is probably some basis to it. I was of the generation that learned how to compute square roots by hand, and pretty nasty work it was too, the more so because we really had no idea what we were doing, merely cycling through some memorized steps - understanding that algorithm takes a bit of calculus, and we hadn't studied algebra yet. Of course calculators made such skills obsolete, like the algorithms for long division, and even multiplication and addition of multi-digit numbers. The reaction to this overemphasis on rote memorization has, as usual, been an over-reaction to the extent that even learning the multiplication tables has been deprecated. I think this is based on an underappreciation of the role that memory plays in thought.
Which brings me back to Iapetus. One of the great geological detective stories is that of the unravelling of the history of this ocean that perished before the first vertebrates walked on land. This story is a major focus of Richard Fortey's book Earth: An Intimate History. The mountain ranges resulting from the extinction of this ocean stretch across much of Eastern North America and Westernmost Europe (The Appalachians, The Caledonides of Scotland, Wales, and Norway). The strata of these mountains present an almost incomprehensible jumble, compressed, folded, older rocks pushed on top of younger not once but many times, scrambled, cooked in the depths of the Earth and brought forth again by 400 million years of erosion. The elucidation of the mystery is the story of a great idea, tectonic plates, but even more the story of generations of patient mapping and detective work.
Fortey describes John Dewey, one of the elucidators:
To hold the whole of the Appalachians and half the Caldonides in his brain came naturally to himWithout that great resource of memory, solving the mystery would have been impossible. It is the same in every science - your knowledge, your memory, is your greatest analytical tool. This is true in every profession: the doctor, the lawyer, the mathematician all build their analytical skills on a great mountain of knowledge. Primitive hunter-gatherers are no different - each one has a depth of knowledge of the local biogeography that is the envy of biologists working among them. Reasoning about history is almost impossible without those convenient signposts of remembered dates.
Our memories are never better than they were in our childhood. Kids need to be acquiring knowledge: facts, figures, and algorithms. For most kids, it's even fun.
Comments
Post a Comment