Let's Listen to Math

by Anne White

This post combines some of our favourite things: Denise Gaskins' approach to teaching mathematics in a way that reflects Charlotte Mason's principles; the New Mason Jar podcast; and the chance for thoughtful educators to dialogue about ideas.

Your assignment (and I do hope you choose to accept it) is, first, to listen to the podcast episodes (here and here) where Cindy Rollins and Dawn Duran interview Denise. 

“[A child’s] education should also offer him passage into wide-open spaces full of treasures to be encountered, appreciated, and enjoyed no matter how he spends the laboring portion of his days.” (Karen Glass, Much May Be Done With Sparrows)

Then come back here and consider these discussion questions. Maybe you would like to get a couple of friends together and talk about them. Or you can post your answers in the Comments section.  

Introductory Questions

1. What is one way that you used math today? (Outside of teaching it.)

2. You are ten years old and you’ve finished your arithmetic worksheet. The teacher says you can go to her shelf of special activities and choose a game to play.  Would you pick something that looked like a math game? Why or why not?

Discussion Questions

1. Denise Gaskins’ website, and one of her books, are called “Let’s Play Math.” Before listening to these interviews, what might you have assumed about her approach to mathematics? How did that change after hearing the podcasts?

2. What does math class at your house look like? Are you interested in exploring more of the "play math" suggestions (games, journalling, reading library books) with your own students?

3. Which of the following quotes make the most sense to you? Are there any that you disagree with?

"Math should be like a nature walk."

"Thinking hard can be fun."

"The 3 R's of math are to Recognize and Reason about Relationships.”

"What children need most are a few basic principles and the ability to reason, to draw their own conclusions about how numbers, shapes, and patterns work.”   

4. The podcast presenters suggested that when Charlotte Mason said that, in her time, the standard approach to math teaching did not need to be “fixed” because it wasn’t “broken.” Do you think our view of mathematics (and math teaching) has become more broken since then?

5. You have a friend who sees herself as more of a math person than someone who enjoys literature and art. Is there a way you could give her an understanding of C. M. principles through the lens of mathematics?

Are you feeling liminal?

(Photo taken at Woolwich Dam and Reservoir, September 2024)

by Anne White

In the bleakness of January 2021 (when it felt like Christmas had taken a Narnia-like pass and the winter would go on imprisoning us forever), Amber Sparks wrote a piece for ElectricLiterature.com, called "I Just Want to Hang Out in the Wardrobe." 

Well, who wouldn't? But Sparks (chafing in that pandemic limbo) says her craving isn't for full-on Narnia; she writes, "I’ve been wishing instead to stop at the threshold, to open the door of the spare room and crawl into that wardrobe and not come out again." She goes on to talk about the particular attraction of "liminal spaces" in literature--the thresholds, vestibules, hallways, or phantom tollbooths that lead us to--well, somewhere else. That cinematic moment when Dorothy pauses with her hand on the doorknob; or, in The Secret Garden, Mary finding the locked door in the wall. Sparks doesn't specifically mention C. S. Lewis's "Wood Between the Worlds," but that would also fall into the "liminal" category: not a world in itself, but a place containing the doorways to all the other worlds. 

She warns that those of us over a certain age may never be able to return fully to the fantasy worlds that not only enriched our childhoods, but that, often, helped us survive them. As a child, she dreamed of finding "a place where a kind of low, slow magic still exists, where gym class doesn’t, where underdogs are issued powerful weapons and magical powers"; and books became those magical spaces for her. And for a time so long that we think it won't end, we keep returning, until one day, like Alice in Wonderland, we find we can no longer fit through the doorway.

"At 42, let’s be real, I can’t imagine a talking animal giving me a magic talisman without snickering a little. The first time I thought about how the Pevensie children’s mother must have broken her heart with worry when she sent them to the country, I think I wept a little to be so grown up at last."

But there is still a memory of that enchantment that we allow ourselves, or perhaps there is a new one that (as Sparks says) we don't fully experience until we have slowed down enough to appreciate those thresholds for themselves. 

"Waiting is, in fact, a repellent concept for most children, eager to be in action, eager for answers."

It might be similar to discovering a peculiar enjoyment of airports and train stations; or even of the journey itself, rattling down tracks past the backsides of towns, or suspended in that unlike-anything-else time of flight, before we get to our real destination. T. S. Eliot wrote about exactly that sense in "The Dry Salvages" (part of the Four Quartets):

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus...

Some of you reading this may still be able to fit yourselves fully through the doorways of enchantment; to get off the train and know you have arrived. Others, like the camel in Nick Butterworth's The Little Gate, may find they have to kneel down or unload a few things first. And then there are those of us whose knees are getting a bit stiff to go through fairy doorways. What then shall we do? Just wait outside?

Sparks finds that writing itself "is a kind of liminal space, with all the possibilities of wonder and none of the risk. We can’t get back to Neverland once we are grown, but we can write a path through the midnight sky." In other words, there is a sense that our creativity can open those worlds for others. And perhaps those of us who don't write (or paint or compose or sculpt or weave), but do read, and particularly those of us who read to others (older or younger), can do the same. This also applies to those who teach Sunday school, lead nature walks, or explore mathematics joyfully. 

And for ourselves? Even if we cannot force our way in, Sparks says, we may still find that "liminal spaces have a regenerative power of their own...Perhaps we liminal adults can feel we, too, belong, that the world is almost a good place for us, too, if we can remake it in these spaces." These outside places, these doorsteps and waiting spaces, also have things to teach us.

As Sparks says, liminal spaces can still offer wonder, without the risk. Maybe there is a new kind of adventure for us right there in the woods, even when the magic rings are lost. 

An Act of Faith

by Donna-Jean Breckenridge

In Jan Karon’s Christmas story, “Shepherds Abiding,” she wrote, “In the face of losing everything one hoped for, lighting a tree was an act of faith.” The main character, Father Tim, is cheered by the sight.

“Well done! he thought, pulling his hat down and his collar up. 

“He walked more briskly, glad to be alive on the hushed and lamplit street where every storefront gleamed with promise.”

This Christmas, you may be surrounded by hard things. It may be the loss of a loved one this past year (we at AmblesideOnline grieve our beloved friend and Advisory member, Wendi Capehart), it may be a shattered dream, it may be a financial struggle or a wayward child. But Christmas takes courage, as Advisory members Donna-Jean Breckenridge and Lynn Bruce recounted recently in an episode of The New Mason Jar with Cindy Rollins. And sometimes just the act of lighting a tree, baking some cookies, and wrapping a gift takes all the courage you’ve got. 

Know that we pray for you. In the prayer of Father Tim in that same book, “Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, who settest the solitary in families: We commend to thy continual care the homes in which thy people dwell. Put far from them, we beseech thee, every root of bitterness, the desire of vainglory, and the pride of life. Fill them with faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness. Knit together in constant affection those who, in holy wedlock, have been made one flesh. Turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents; and so enkindle fervent charity among us all, that we may evermore be kindly affectioned one to another; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

To our beloved AmblesideOnline Community around the world, we on the Advisory wish you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy and Blessed New Year, and a reminder of the greatest news of all: Emmanuel! God with us. Jesus is real -  the Story is true! 

To hear the entire podcast, click here:

https://thenewmasonjar.com/047-2/