I recently stumbled upon a transcript of a teacher experimenting with the Socratic Method. I was amazed at what happened, and what I read. It wasn’t so much the use of the Socratic Method, but what was being taught.

The idea of teaching children other bases for counting at an early stage is fascinating. Scientists argue that teaching children to count and do math with only 10 as a base limits the potential of our evolution. I would argue a different point. Couldn’t we take a similar approach when it comes to how we teach children about languages and grammar.

Getting children to think in the terms of “how” and “why” when it comes to language seems a lot more helpful than trying to get the children to memorize all irregular verbs, for example. I’ll go back to the math. Children are taught (at least when I was back in school) the times table starting with one and ending with twelve. Then, they have to start over when they reach 13 and learn how to do math properly, although that is done with a calculator in most schools – skipping the nuisance of having to teach it.

The next time I am asked to teach something – I’ll skip the Jeopardy approach and ask questions instead of handing out answers.