My wife is a remedial teacher at a primary school situated in a coloured township.  (See bottom of post for a short explanation of the terms ‘coloured’ and ‘township’ as they are used in South Africa.)  Her school has a large proportion of children experiencing barriers to learning (the new, politically correct term for ‘learning disability’), and her job is to help them catch up in those areas of the work (generally Math and language skills) where they are struggling.  Some days she comes home dejected, convinced that she’s not making any progress, the next she’s so excited about a kid that had a breakthrough she can’t stop chattering about it.

Yesterday, though, she regaled me with a story of something that happened in her colleague’s second-grade class that made me think about the role that contextual analysis play in tasks such as teaching.  Her colleague was trying to teach the children about subtracting.  She used the terms ‘take away’ and ‘make less’ to explain the concept, but to no avail.  The children simply could not get it. Continue reading “On the importance of context” →