Day 44
For one year, 365 days, this blog will address the Common Core Standards from the perspective of creating an alternate, ambient learning environment for math. Ambient is defined as “existing or present on all sides, an all-encompassing atmosphere.” And ambient music is defined as: “Quiet and relaxing with melodies that repeat many times.”
Why ambient? A math teaching style that’s whole and all encompassing, with themes that repeat many times through the years, is most likely to be effective and successful. Today’s post, a variety of voices proclaiming the wonder and value of fairy tales, will be a prelude to tomorrow’s story.
Albert Einstein
If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be geniuses, read them more fairy tales.
When i examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract thinking.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. The true sign of intelligence is imagination.”
Marie Curie
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.
Hans Christian Anderson
Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale of all.
CS Lewis
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly.
Charles Dickens
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
Jewish Folk Saying
Don’t ask questions of fairy tales.
GK Chesterton
Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that the dragons can be killed.
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learned in the nursery . . . the things I believed most in then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. This philosophy is that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.
Bruno Bettelheim
To everybody who has heard fairy tales, the image and feeling of being lost in a deep, dark forest are unforgettable.
Once children become better acquainted with fairy tales, the fearsome aspects seem to disappear, while the reassuring features become ever more dominant. The original displeasure of anxiety then turns into the great pleasure of anxiety successfully faced and mastered.
Rudolf Steiner
Just as the body needs to have nutritive substances circulating through the organism, the soul needs fairy tale substance flowing through its veins.
Because fairy tales belong to our innermost feeling and emotional life and to everything connected with it, they are of all forms of literature the most appropriate for children’s hearts and minds. It is evident that they are able to combine the richest wisdom with the simplest manner of expression . . . there is no greater art than this one, which traces the path from the unknown, unknowable depths of the soul to the charming and often playful fairy tale pictures.
Knowledge ensues in an environment dedicated to imaginative, creative knowing, where student and teacher alike surrender to the ensuing of that knowledge as a worthy goal. Tune in tomorrow for a wonderful Kindergarten fairy tale farewell . . .
