Creativity and learning

One of the most annoying things for me is thinking how the Israeli school system misuses technology in the service of education.

The Israeli Ministry of Education teach technology in the classroom instead of using technology to teach. In other words, we have teachers taking 90 hour courses in learning Excel and first grade students being taught to use Microsoft Paint.

This is of course - a total waste of time and tax-payer money. Children already know about and use technology like the iPhone, social media like Facebook and online video like Youtube and Hulu.

I started thinking about this in a discussion in the car yesterday coming back from a wonderful visit to Yad Hanadiv - I asked my wife why small children stop being so inquisitive after first grade - I've always thought it was the educational system that destroyed their curiosity by spoon feeding knowledge and regimenting problem solving.

I then got into an argument with my daughter about why the primary school system in Israel 20 years ago (when she was in first grade) used בדידים - colored pieces of woods of different lengths - I think white was 1. The idea was to that using colors and physical lengths of things you can hold was a good way of teaching addition and subtraction. I recall participating in a PTA meeting with her first grade teacher who tried to teach the method to the parents - I vividly remember that I was never able to correlate the colors with the lengths of the pieces of wood.

This morning I took back what I said about the colors after listening to Gell-Mann's 2007 lecture on getting creative ideas.

We used color coding of entity types during a system analysis of the facilities area at Fab8 and I remember that beyond serving as a memory aid - the colors stimulated social interaction in the group - as we collected data in wall charting sessions in a conference room.

Social interaction is an important part of learning and it seems that the colors help reinforce the interaction.

So - using colors is a creative idea - that may have been useful, although to this day I cannot understand what is wrong with rote learning of arithmetic.