After many weeks of thinking and writing, at last I have posted the first major chunk of my math relearning project. The result: I now know what a number is. I still need to write about place value and some fundamental math concepts, but after that I’ll learn how to count. (That’s why I couldn’t tell you how many weeks it’s been.)
I’ve decided that rotating through my subject areas one per day wasn’t satisfying enough, so now I’m trying a week per area. At the end of each week I decide whether to continue with that area or switch to another. So far it’s mostly been math every week, but I’ve also been reading about Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t know if or what I’ll write about that or when. The problems with one area per day were that I couldn’t get much done in one day, and some days I’d have other things to do, so I’d have to wait a week to get back to that subject.
I’m hoping the rest of this math project won’t take so long. I think the reasons this first section did are that I was analyzing concepts I normally take for granted, I was translating the methods for teaching children into the underlying concepts those lessons implied, I was reorganizing the material I read to create a new synthesis, which always takes forever, and I wasn’t thinking much about how I could do all that in shorter iterations. But hopefully for the rest of the project the analysis will become more straightforward as the topics progress.
This week I’m going to try to tie up the loose ends on some of my other projects, so I’ll be doing my daily subject rotation again.
