I was teaching in a teacher training college in south west London which
had historic roots in Froebel's methods. The Froebel Foundation had given
me a tiny grant (and a good lunch) to undertake some work on children's
understanding of computer databases. The maths ed group I was working in
had good links to Zoltan Diennes. So I was using a mixture of LOGO
procedures, physical and computer representation of various bits of
Diennes apparatus to provide physical, graphical and computer database
instances of the dataset to question childrens' developing capability in
boolean algebra. I had heard the words "radical constructivism" and I had
read Bateson's SEM ( a friend at a LOGO conference had recommended it)
and von Glaserfeld.
I did not know Mike Cole was a few tube stops away. Vygostky was
something that the "language" people may occasionally talk about, and as
far as I understood at the time, it was all to do with language. Working
with inner-city kids made me question the degree of abstraction my methods
were embracing ( I remember citing Labov in the past).
I was listening to Douglas Adams' work on the radio and beginning to amass
a collection of African popular music. I was sometimes found marching in
protest against Margret Thatcher or in favour of the release of Nelson
Mandela. I was starting to think it was time for my children to move out
of London- although I did not particularly think of my native Wales.
Martin
"A big Hi to all you sentient beings out there. For the rest of you, the
trick is to bang the rocks together."
D.N.Adams (1952-2001)
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