Yesterday after dinner in White Plains a typical belabored dinner-table discussion erupted, with Marys Lee and Lloyd joining with Rob to argue that high school kids shouldn't need to learn things like geometry, trig and algebra. Graham and I took the other side, maintaining that there was real value in forcing kids to study things that seem impractical and divorced from the reality of day to day living.
I won't bore you with the details of the argument. What was most interesting to me after the fact was going for a walk with Graham afterwards (to loosen up a little space in our tummies for the brownies I had just baked) and hearing how he was excited to have rehearsed and run through the possible pros and contras of this argument in case he gets in it again later with his friends. Which really kind of proved the point of how important it is to get kids to think in terms of building mental muscles and habits of the type that is facilitated by math study. It is very gratifying to see him internalize these lessons, as opposed to just ingesting ever vaster and vaster quantities of seemingly undifferentiated and unstructured factoids from the internet. It's all good, mind you, but some goods are better than others.
On the second of our half mile walking loops around Rob and George's neighborhood we discussed how Graham's study of Latin prepares him well to study not just Romance languages but also Germanic and/or Slavic ones, simply because he is used to working with case systems. Graham allowed that if a university's distribution requirements forced him to study a modern language he'd be "pretty pissed," but I still hope he will bite the bullet somewhere in there. Languages just do a brain good.
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