Present reasons based on educational theory and practical use in the classroom.
I am not a great fan of educational theories as most of them seem to have been cooked up
by Profs with little or no reference to real classroom situations.
I am, however, a fan of
Piaget, as his
Theory of Cognitive Development has been seen by me
on a daily basis to have quite a large grounding in reality, and it can be used as a tools to
understanding cognitive difficulties children experience when learning anything.
I believe that one of the salient errors of many teachers is the feeling that to get children to
understand things they should simplify things (and that simplification is always from the
view of an adult as to what constitutes simplification).
What I do think has to be done is not to 'simplify' things at all as this rests on the theory that
children are somehow simpler than adults, which they are not, they just think in different ways
and inhabit different psychological worlds to adults.
To get children to understand things such as a conditional loop a teacher has to find a real world
example that those children can relate to, and that real world example will not necessarily be
simple at all, indeed it may be extremely complex.
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15 years ago, watching my two sons (14 and 12 at the time) play World of Warcraft was an intensely
humbling experience because I was forced to admit that I really hadn't a clue about even the most basic events
in that game 'world' while they were at home in it as a seal was in the sea.
So, then to say that children need things to be simplified seems plain insulting.