Re: tools

Marie Nelson (mnel who-is-at nlu.nl.edu)
Sun, 8 Oct 1995 16:36:45 -0500 (CDT)

On Sun, 8 Oct 1995 SMAGOR who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu wrote:

> my own bias comes from a set of case studies I did of kids
> interpreting literature through art, dance, drama, and music.
[snip]...
> >From a cultural perspective, not all groups have historically
> relied on the same mediational means as Westerners, as many

I agree. I think we would benefit by deliberately seeking multiple
varieties of mediation. My own thinking has been influenced by several
years, in my twenties, spent in Japan, where the soroban (abacus) was used
by shopkeepers rather than cash registers. Every Japanese child studied
soroban for several years, if I remember correctly, much as physics and
engineering students used to use slide rules, which allowed them to do
far more advanced calculations than could be done in the head.

I remember being told by Japanese univeristy faculty in both organic
chemistry and p-chem about studies which showed that, at that time (middle
sixties), master soroban users could calculate many functions faster than
computers could.

I also remember that my friends, before paying a shopkeeper, would double
check the total on an imaginary soroban, their fingers moving rapidly over
an empty palm in much the same way they would skecth Kanji (chinese
characters) in the air above their palms when discussing the derivation
or "spelling" of a word.

I've often wondered about the impact of ideographic representation on
abstract thinking and learning. Does the use of ideographs in far eastern
writing systems and the use (and imagined use) of the soroban in math,
keep the calculations/conceepts at a more concrete level and in this way
facilitate fluency at higher levels of abstract thought?

At any rate, I think our increased use of manipulatives in teaching math
is a step in this direction, but I wonder if we might not alsodo well to
teach soroban, the calculator that does not rely on batteries and that
does not have to be present to be used.

What do others think?

Marie