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Michael Pershan's avatar

You might be interested in David Perkin's extended riff on this metaphor: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/09/01/education-bat-seven-principles-educators

<isthereHTML?><blockquote>Perkins identifies two unfortunate tendencies in education: One is what he calls “elementitis” — learning the components of a subject without ever putting them together. The other is the tendency to foster “learning about” something at the expense of actually learning it. “You don't learn to play baseball by a year of batting practice,” he says, but in learning math, for instance, students are all too often presented with prescribed problems with only one right solution and no clear indication how they connect with the real world.

The way to let young learners play the whole game is to find or construct a junior version of it. A junior version of baseball may involve fewer innings, a diamond that is smaller than standard, or teams consisting of whatever neighborhood kids show up in the park on a given day. Yet the junior version conveys the essence of baseball — swinging at and hitting a ball and then making your way around bases while the opposing team scrambles to put you out.

In teaching math, drilling children in multiplication or long division or even giving them “word problems” is likely to lapse into “elementitis.” But giving a child some money and asking her to calculate whether it's enough to buy the items in her shopping basket is a “junior version” of the way math skills are used in the real world.</blockquote></whatnoHTML?>

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Marty Clarke's avatar

This is a really important distinction. When I set up a drill in basketball, the kids know why we are doing it and what aspect of the game we are trying to work on. Plus, it is dynamic and kids react to things that their teammates are doing. Kids don’t necessarily have that same intuition about a fluency topic and don’t often have the bigger picture and narrative about how that skill fits in to bigger questions they are tackling and why they might care about improving it. If someone wanted to take a 100 free throws after practice it was usually the direct result of them missing a bunch of free throws in a game or knowing they get fouled a lot. If I had multiple practices or even one where all I had everyone do was shoot free throws there *might* be some benefit but there would rightfully be a mutiny because it misses the mark of what it means to play basketball. Seems like a pretty big and exciting job to keep thinking about how to get every kid excited about the full and messy performance of math.

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