So I am currently unable to find my book, though doubtless it will reappear conveniently sometime tomorrow. Consequently, for the moment, I am unable to read Papert’s essay. I have, however, done some research, so hopefully I won’t embarrass myself in class tomorrow. From what I understand, Papert, aside from creating a brilliant programming language, and a “turtle”, was an advocate of changing the educational system to include better ways of teaching and learning through developing software such as Turtle Geometry whereby children could learn by making rather than learn by doing. Papert believed that children were not inclined to be bad or good at math, but rather that the methods used to teach mathematics were not conducive to learning mathematics. In short, children were overcoming obstacles and managing to learn in spite of the system rather than actually being aided by it. In response, he created Turtle Geometry, a program that allowed children to create geometric shapes and plug in algorithms, etc, to modify the shapes.
Being naturally inclined to hate all things related to math, I was a little suspicious of this plan at first. How is creating a square that different from just looking at one? Is is different? And if so, how does that difference alter one’s perception of the square? But by applying the same logic to language, I began to understand how it might work. Reading a sentence in a language is never the same as forming your own. In the human mind, several things are going on at once that enable us to form our own unique sentences, which is why we often fumble or misspeak. However, these same processes are not occurring when one is reading. Yes, there is a degree of translation and understanding required, but to form a sentence is much more complicated and more conducive to language learning than just being able to read a sentence. Non fluent speakers can often read and understand sentences in a language, but when asked to construct a sentence, they often struggle and their sentences are full of mistakes. By applying this same logic to other learning processes, including the dreaded mathematics, it seems logical that self-creation is much more conducive to actual learning that merely reading about a subject.
