My three children are as distinct and beautifully themselves as any three human beings can be – and yet they undoubtedly developed along a nearly identical track, experiencing the same lurches and regressions at roughly the same stages of development.
Most of us miss the first part of DeCartes’ most famous axiom. He actually said, “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum,” which translates, roughly, to “I doubt, therefore I think, I think therefore I am.”
Turns out that the first part is super important. To doubt is to ask questions that pressure-test assumptions and choices.
Early childhood years are all about curiosity…
We’re living in the middle of the revolution that has reshaped our world. In this episode, Tom Preston-Werner, MMS parent and founder and former CEO of GitHub, joins for a wide-ranging conversation about the role technology plays in modern life, what we should do about exposing our kids to it, and how we should go about preparing them to be agile, creators, not passive consumers. Parents sometimes wonder whether they’re disadvantaging future coders by sending them to a low-tech school. Tom’s answer might surprise you.
In this episode, we dive into a topic that most parents wrestle with because it’s essential and really, really hard. Communication or perhaps more accurately – healthy communication – is critical for a human being at any age to express feelings, preferences, needs and to receive those messages from others. The question is how do we as parents help our kids build strong communication skills? – always a challenge but never more so than in today’s digital world. Siri Panday, Director of Education for Toddler and Primary at Marin Montessori School, joins to share her insights and a few helpful tips for parents.
We’re all scientists before we’re science students. When their natural curiosity is not cultivated, though, they can lose interest in the scientific principles that allow them to see their world differently.
It’s not their fault, of course.
Storytelling is in our DNA. As human beings, we evolved to tell stories as a way to convey emotion and share information. Storytelling is how we educate and entertain. It’s how we learn about our world and find meaning in it. More than anything, storytelling is how we connect with one another.
We know things in relation to other things – we know tall in comparison to short, clean in comparison to messy. So why wouldn’t we compare what our children know to some standard of what they should be learning? After all, we worry they’re falling behind or, on the flip side, take pride in their ability to achieve beyond expectations. Comparison to a standard makes almost unimpugnable sense.
For those who aren’t accustomed to Montessori classrooms, it might seem a bit curious that children cook, clean, sew, and more. There’s actually a lot behind all the cupcakes the students are baking – from complicated math to complex collaboration.
When I saw this New Yorker cover several years ago I could not take my eyes off of it. As we live through our society’s digital-technological revolution, it symbolized, in playful yet somewhat dystopic imagery, the heart of a concern I was feeling—and still do to some degree.
