learning one on one

Ivan Illich, one of the founders of the idea of conviality, also wrote a book called Unschooling Society. Today I had an experience that reaffirmed for me the importance of learning one on one, outside of an institutional, school setting. I was tutoring Colin, who is in seventh grade. Like most kids, he has a devil of a time with fractions, especially adding and subtracting them. I brought my Cuisenaire rods and a book that explains adding fractions using the manipulatable Cuisenaire rods. Cuisenaire rods are little wooden objects one centimeter wide, one centimeter tall, and one to ten centimeters long. Each length is a different color. For example, the one centimeter rod is white, the two is red, the three is light green, five is yellow, ten is orange and so on.

If you line up all the one color trains that equal the orange (ten) you can see that five reds make a train, and two yellows. The yellow rod is half of the orange, and the red is one fifth of the orange. Each white rod is one tenth. It becomes easy for kids to see that doing a problem like 1/2 plus 1/5 involves counting how many whites are in 1/2 of orange (it's five) and how many are in 1/5 of orange (two), and that five tenths plus two tenths equals seven tenths.

Colin got very excited about this. Normally a somewhat laconic, bored student, he eagerly worked through four pages of this stuff. When his mother came, he proudly presented her with the four worksheets. She looked them over very carefully and congratulated him.

I thought, "The moral of the story is, Everybody can be successful. It just takes the right kind of experience, in order to understand. Everybody might need a different kind of experience. And that can only happen when kids are taught one at a time."

For more about Cuisenaire learning materials, see this site:

http://www.etacuisenaire.com/

The Fractions book that I use is on this page:

http://www.etacuisenaire.com/catalog/product?deptId=FRACTIONSDECIMALSPERCENTS&prodId=4270