Post # 35 Linkages

We teach calendars.  We teach the days and weeks, the months and years.  Elementary school is fixed in what day it is until the day dissolves into minutes and hours.  We teach the sequencing and that one day follows the next with regularity.

For some reason we fail to teach that years evolve into decades and decades into centuries.  We fail to hang events on the larger tree of time.  I regularly ask social studies teachers to use time lines.  Like our number lines stretching from 0 to 1 and 0 to 10 and 10 to 100, history teachers should teach number lines in centuries.

I regularly see students who think that the Renaissance  was just a little while before the Great Depression.  So we in our extensions can help students across the curriculum by teaching number lines in larger ...to the extreme...representations.  For middle school and high school students, I like to draw a number line in centuries and hang the major events of modern world history like ornaments dangling like ornaments from some odd branch.  I draw linkages between events and decades, between major periods our history and out time.

Students like to see the march of time with pictures linked to the centuries.  When we draw a number line from 0 to 2000 and paste up a picture of knights and castles or the Mona Lisa, we help them to see history and numbers as immense and linear, sequential, building and growing from number to number, year to year, century to century up to today.

How lovely it would be to see the days of the week, linked to the weeks of a month, linked to one year and that one full year linked to some tiny point on a larger number line, one with historical events told in pictures.   I'd like to see the fall of Rome, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution....locomotives, early automobiles, rockets.  All, on a gigantic number line.

We should team teach more.