= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
waveman comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (152)
I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year's worth of "professional" swim training had seemingly achieved very little.
The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time - like the Montessori method.
Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.
So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she found learning to get around by kicking quite easy.
I progressively let down the vest over a period of a few visits. She progressively learned to leverage her "getting around" skills into "staying afloat" skills.
I then showed her how to swim in various styles ie dog paddling, breast stroke, then freestyle with head out of the water, then freestyle with proper breathing.
Eventually we took off the flippers and after a short adjustment, she could swim! All in less than a month. It was amazing to see after all those swimming lessons.
I would love to find a similar way to teach riding a bicycle. You can easily take learning to pedal offline. Steering plus balancing seem to be tightly coupled though, and the way you have to turn is very unintuitive thus hard to learn.
Teaching requires that you take all your implicit procedural knowledge and turn it into explicit declarative knowledge. In effect you have to reverse-engineer your skill.
When I was teaching my daughter French, she said "French is so dumb - why do they have all those irregular verbs?". So I took her through a few irregular English verbs. She had learned them all without explicitly realizing the fact that many common English verbs are irregular.
Unfortunately a lot of swim instructors do not teach very well...maybe because we're all teenagers getting paid $0.50 an hour more than minimum wage to be wet and freezing for 3 to 4 hours at a time. I'm fairly passionate about teaching swimming, but I'm a bit if an anomaly at work and people think I'm odd. If your daughter listens to you, she's probably better off learning at least preliminary swimming skills from you. If you want her to get really good, the quality of swim team teaching is usually better than your standard public swimming lessons. Or I could send you a list of suggestions...it would actually make me really happy. How old is your daughter?
Take a set of training wheels that are adjustable in height, and gradually raise them farther and farther off the ground. That's how I learned.
Giving kids one of these when they're little is also a good start.
Or, better, one of these
For teaching bicycle riding the same way, you need one of these: http://www.thegyrobike.com/
You can slowly reduce the power on it in the same way as letting air out of the floaties.
I don't know what the swimming programs in your area are like, but where I live (under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Lifesaving Society), the kids start out with skills in the shallow end (floats, front and back, first assisted and then unassisted, kicking on noodles, dunking their heads, etc) and as soon as Preschool C, the third level, one of the items on the checklist is having them swim around in a lifejacket in the deep end. I don't rigidly follow the checklists because I find it limiting, but most instructors do, meaning that in most of Canada at least, they should be taking 4-year-olds in the deep end with aids.
As far as biking, there are roller setups that bicyclists ride their bikes on sometimes (for warmups maybe?). If you had something like that, you could stand next to her and hold her up giving less and less support until she can stay up there.