February 28th, 2008
Time has been getting away from me lately and I haven’t had much time to devote to the flashcard project. I have noticed that my DD (who is now a two-year-old!) is starting to be more interested in stories than just pictures, and I found a beautiful site dedicated to public domain illustrated children’s literature. Check it out!
the Rosetta Project - Pre-Reader and Very Early Reader
Many of these books can be adapted to my website with little or no modification! I am starting to feel inspired to do a couple this weekend… but have so many other things I should be doing… we’ll see 
I also found a site by someone who did the Glenn Doman flashcards with her son for a year and who made all of her flashcard sets available online. I don’t think the images are public domain, but it is a good place to get ideas for complete sets without having to do so much research first:
Classical Mommy - The Bits Collection
Unfortunately, she ultimately came to a negative conclusion about the method, but after reading her thoughts I still think that the online flashcards approach minimizes the negatives and maximizes the positives of the program for the following reasons:
- Using online flashcards minimizes the amount of time needed to develop the materials. Okay, obviously I’m putting a lot of time into it, but my visitors can get the benefit of my work with zero effort.
- There is much less effort involved in running the sessions. Instead of drilling the flashcards with my daughter, I can concentrate on cuddling with her and telling her how sweet and smart she is.
- My daughter gets to choose from eight sets which ones she likes the best, making the learning process more child-directed than the Doman method.
I have noticed some interesting trends lately:
- She never picks the cards with words only. Words and pictures together are much more entertaining.
- Ever since I added the numerals set, she never picks the red dots numbers any more.
- She loves looking at the common words over and over.
- When the common words are read in German, she usually says the English word instead of the German.
- When she looks at geography sets, she doesn’t repeat the countries any more. Instead she says “map” for each slide. The same thing with the dogs and dinosaurs, she just says “dog” or “dinosaur” for each slide.
Posted in resources, the content, the little girl (2/06) | No Comments »
February 7th, 2008
I have been noticing lately that it seems like sometimes when I click on the flashcard sets, the server takes a long time to respond and sometimes gives a timeout error. I am currently hosting this site with the GoDaddy! economy hosting package which allows 250 GB of transfer bandwidth per month. Since I am only using about 5 GB per week, I thought everything should be working, so I called GoDaddy! technical support to ask what the problem could be.
Apparently the problem is with the flash wrapper (soundmanager2.swf) file that I am using to play the audio files. Since this file is fairly large and since it is accessed each time a flashcard set is selected, this file was getting too many simultaneous connections and slowing down the server. For now, my solution was to make multiple copies of this file. Every time a flashcard set is selected, it will now randomly access one of five copies of the flash wrapper. Hopefully, this will improve performance and reduce the time spent waiting for a set to load.
Posted in the webapp, traffic | No Comments »
February 1st, 2008
I just read an article called This Isn’t Just MY Problem, Friend, and it clarified for me a bit more what I think is the problem in schools. Here is a short excerpt from the article:
My kids are doing fine in school; they even like it. But you know what they come home showing me? Worksheets where they got everything right. That’s what they think they’re SUPPOSED to be proud of. That they can sit, and concentrate, and finish what they’re doing (they don’t get to go out to recess unless they do), and get everything right. Well, dammit, THAT’s not thinking. That’s learning to be efficient and get the answers you’re supposed to get. Thinking is something else entirely. Its being curious, and being wrong most of the time, and maybe, just maybe coming up with something you’ve made that you’re proud of and pleased with, something all your own (even if it turns out later that someone else had thought of it too).
For the most part, I agree with this statement. I don’t think rote memorization of trivia can be classified as “thinking”, although I do think it can be classified as learning. In my opinion, “thinking” is another level, where you can take all these facts you have learned and connect them in some way and use them to reach new conclusions. It’s not that memory work is not important. To a large extent the amount of thinking a person is able to do is determined by the number of learned facts they have in their memory banks to draw upon. But memorization is not, in and of itself, thinking.
I had one really good history teacher in high school that encouraged thinking. We were expected to learn historical facts, and then he would have us write an in-class essay each week that forced us to apply these facts to some question. I remember the first time I stepped foot in that class he had us write an essay about the moral implications of Columbus’ discovery of America. That was the only teacher I felt encouraged original thought, and it was one of my favorite classes, even if I didn’t always do so well due to not memorizing enough facts.
I think it’s rather sad that in 12 years in a pretty good school system I had only one teacher that ever encouraged me to THINK on a regular basis. Even in this case, I was told to direct my thoughts onto analyzing history, where I would prefer for people to be encouraged to THINK about how to create the best possible lives for themselves and humankind.
Obviously, a flashcard website is going to be geared towards memorization. My goal is to make memorization of facts more fun, more efficient, and less time consuming so that there is more time for actual creative thought.
Posted in the motivation | No Comments »