A truly wonderful exercise is to imagine what is happening right now in different time zones around the world.
What are people doing right now in Madagascar, or in New Zealand, or in Japan? You have to know what time of day it is there,
what season it is, what climate, what the place is like and what people do there.
Here is a song that travels around the world through the international time zones.
What is teaching if not providing tools to switch on our extraordinary natural human capabilities and equipment? “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish…” goes the saying.
The human “toolbox” is immense! It’s a multi-leveled, multi-dimensional, poly-chromatic symphony of sympathies, attitudes, choices and connections. Just like we are!
It’s like the inverse of one of those ancient Chinese box puzzles. Instead of opening a big box and finding smaller and smaller boxes inside, you open a small box and find a bigger one inside! The more you use the tools, the more they open up new frontiers!
Instead of reducing everything down to fit ‘little box’ views of the world, the natural tools open everything up into greater and greater vistas!
Right now Talking Hands Talking Feet is doing “Math-a-magic” with a wild bunch of 2nd graders in Santa Fe. It’s a blast! It turns conventional math teaching on its head, actually helping kids to think according to natural principles (as a compliment to their textbook learning).
Math-a-magic includes the songs: Cents-Ability, Two and A Day Around the World.
The song Cents-Ability is a helpful learning tool offering comparisons between the standard U.S. coins for primary age students.
The song Two offers a fun call and response style discovery workshop into the “laws of nature”, specifically the very influential “law of two”!
A Day Around the World is a song to assist and accompany the studies of the World Time Zones and World Geography.
Each song is chock full of math exercises.
The “Math-a-magic philosophy” really comes out from the heart of Arts Integrated Education – which in part, is about left/right brain hemisphere crossover and integration.
Arts Integrated Education is a way of thinking; a way of life; it is an approach to just about everything! Before “teaching” anything, it asks the question of oneself: What is the value and relevance of this subject? It causes you to search for a meaningful context. Then you and your students have a motive for learning that is based in something REAL!
Why do we teach mathematics? Or, to quote from the song, “Why do I need a thing called math?” And as the song explores, there are so many good reasons. Why we teach math and how we go about it is everything!
Mathematics education in the ‘west’ is largely left brain hemisphere directed. And of course, a good part of abstract and symbolic learning is left hemisphere work. But this misses and inadvertently excludes more than half a universe of opportunity!
We’ve always encouraged children from an early age to have an affair with numbers. The best encouragement as always happens by live demonstration.
This is not talking about equations or computation for starters. That naturally follows. This is referring to the mind livening act of simply counting! Yes, just counting.
Numbers themselves are one of the universal languages… like music, color, pattern, movement… A rainbow is composed of seven colors no matter where you are in the world. Snowflakes are six-sided water crystals whether they fall on Mt. Kilimanjaro or Mt. Fuji. The four cardinal directions are universal orientation. There are 33 vertebrae in the human spine; 5 fingers on a hand; 2 hemispheres of the brain; 4 chambers in the heart… The number three represents triads, trinities, triumvirates, trilogies, triunes and triangles that have had great influence throughout human history. And the number one represents both the indivisible unit and the collective unity and wholeness for the Hopis, Hawaiians and Hottentots.
