jojoo

  > If you truly seek to understand the Montessori teaching method and materials, you should look into her writings, including the teacher's guides. 

I have both German Mathematics Teachers Manuals right here. I work with her material nearly every day. My point is that there are better sources to base a mathematics game upon, not that her didactics are inferior (compared to what).

Still if i could choose if my son should go to a "normal" Teacher or a Teacher with a Montessori training i'd choose the latter.

Kilpatrick contra Montessori: I'd call the 70 page critique quite specific. Quote: "The Montessori child learns self-reliance by free choice in relative isolation from the directress. He learns in an individualistic fashion to respect the rights of his neighbors. The kindergarten child learns conformity to social standards mainly through social pressure focused and brought to bear in a kindly spirit by the kindergartner." Clearly the writings of a hater ;)

  > There isn't much difference between the insights of Montessori and Piaget.

How a child learns, what big influence self interest and self control are is quite similar between the both. I personally also agree. The immense impact and usefulness of Piagets stages of cognitive development are orginally his and not to be found in Montessoris Teachings.

  > Piaget was a great scientist who conducted systematic experiments with countless children. Your claim that he only observed his own 3 children is a lie.

Well, it's a hyperbole based on Ginsburg & Opper, 2004. I included the hyperbole b/c i thought it might come up after i brought up Piagets name. His well-respected and often built upon work is often criticized because of lack of initial sample size, reliance on language as critical examination tool and some stages don't develop in all and/or most children like he predicted.

His work was still a giant leap.

  > That last reference you provide is some obscure German PhD thesis which does not reference Montessori's work at all; it has a major focus on teaching mentally retarded children, as well as teaching mathematics out of books to children older than the ones that go to Montessori schools (starting at age 3).

The Author of this thesis is one of the most respected scientists in germany relating to pre-numeric Mathematics. Teachers for mentally retarded children had to think about pre-numeric mathematics long before it became fashionable for younger kids. She based her work on Piaget and Vygotsky. Its quite my point that she didn't base it on Montessori.

You mean of the critique of Maria Montessoris education in general?

Then i'd refer you the 1914s Text from Kilpatrick (From the same time than Montessori, a progressive Educator himself) https://archive.org/details/montessorisystem00kilprich

I just chuckeled as i re-read his accounts of her arithmetics material:

"On the whole, the arithmetic work seemed good, but not remarkable; probably not equal to the better work done in this country. In particular there is very slight effort to connect arithmetic with the immediate life of the child. Certainly, in the teaching of this subject, there is for us no funda- mental suggestion. "

Mind you, that's from 1914. Pedagogics have improved since then...

Or do you mean a better understanding how pre-numeric mathematic works? Most efforts are built around Piagets Teachings (Not very scientific as he "just" observed his own three children) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...

One sample of such a adaptations for pre-numerics (not Geometry) are the works of Carin de Vries (sadly only in German): http://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/1014/1/vridia10.pdf

Keep in mind that Montessoris theory is ~100 years old; it kept up very well but there are shortcomings; IMO especially in the realm of pre-numeric mathematics.

The base of the critique is that Montessori does not provide a conclusive, foundational Layer of (Pre-)Mathematics - a model of more or less depending sub-skills - which would enable A) Educators to better understand their pupils or what they need to further their skills[1] B) enable the invention of new Material. She basically states that children need Material X, Y and Z, but not how and why the work with the material enables them to start using math.

[1] = Which is very important for pupils with different learning paths and/or disabilities.

I think it's usage as real geometry learning tool is very limited. You can even see in the video that the children are wondering what the animation is after completing the puzzles. Fortunately the educator sees this explains it to the boys.

This is not surprising as Maria Montessoris understanding of geometry and pre-numeric Math is nowadays considered to be quite poor.

The usage as a stop-go animation machine seems to be fun, they seem to enjoy it. I've worked with children almost twice as old and they were quite confused about the concept of how to create a stop-go animation, so i'd like to have a similar machine in my school.

As a member of the German Education and Science Union i have to strongly disagree.

Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it.

Year after year all German workers have collective bargaining agreements close to inflation, while the economy booms.

The union-reps are in bed with the companys and workers eat it up.

the hack will be to unlock the i-phone with a photo or some probe. i'd guess starbuck will need less than 5 days.

> why they have to spend three years as an apprentice?

Have you actually looked at a curricula? A lot of it is repetition from school stuff. Sure the Electricians in my example learned in 7th class how to transform Volt to mV or kV. But they often can't reproduce this when they start their apprenticeship (imo the schools are to blame here).

If apprentices don't have problems with that Kind of Math, can write readable reports they generally get a Lehrzeitverkürzung up to 1.5 Years.

Source: I actually read curricula of Apprenticeships, talk with colleagues who work in the Berufsschule if my pupils might have a shot at a apprenticeship (they never do)

Besides that we have longer apprenticeships 1) so that the "german workforce" is more skilled in general. 2) so that if they choose to become Meister to be their own boss they don't need to learn all the extra stuff.

> If you already knew the one thing, chances are you could've quickly learned the other thing as well.

That does certainly apply to abstract things but it doesn't apply well to craftsmanship. To quote RMS: A if-construct does not generate friction against the for loop. But if you bend the cables in the wrong radius, 20 years later when the plastic of the wire-insulation starts degenerating, you might run into problems.

> YAGNI comparing humans to programs? i like to live in a world with skilled human beings that can realize at least some of their potential. an extended apprenticeship might help some to do that.

> We're not talking about great jobs either, it's most jobs that don't require university education. A lot of that is stuff you could be trained for on-the-job in six months or less.

Have you actually learned a real craft, in germany, or looked at it's curriculum? Because they learn a lot more than could be thought in 6 weeks. You could argue that they won't need it for the things their employer needs them to do when they work, but they learn it anyway. If they switch jobs later they won't need that much training.

Example: If you learn as an Electrician for Energy and Houses at a big construction company, the only thing you might do is chopping cable canals and maybe wiring wall sockets. Both could be learned in 6 Weeks, no question.

But at the Berufsschule you still learn all the other stuff, for an example how to wire electrical Garage doors. If you later decide to switch Jobs, you'll be prepared.

> Also, don't buy into the German educational model, it's one of the most discriminatory systems in the world, even though it is "free" on paper, it's all about weeding out people at a young age so they're not allowed to attend the "free" university.

Being a teacher at the very bottom of the german school system, the school formerly known as Sonderschule I 100% agree.

> You can't just insert yourself into someone else's big wall party if they weren't planning on it; those other climbers would be spending multiple days on the route and would almost certainly not have food, water, and portaledge space for you (not to mention how profoundly rude that would be...). If you were indeed at the mercy of needing strangers to rescue you, a passing party or a rescue party would need to change their plans and retreat with you, which would only really be a good call if your life were at risk otherwise.

yeah, you can, it's called hitchhiking. it's not very common; but it has be done, Lynn Hill talks about it in her autobiography. if the climber hitchhiking is good enough, the new party will be faster in the end.

in this case he could just wait on a ledge until other climbers went by and ascended with them.

maybe it was a video from magnus mitboe? https://youtu.be/BEc5uVsM6bE?t=1m33s

or the 80ies oldschool classic; wolfgang guellich in a german gameshow: https://youtu.be/rugoETlUAVI?t=22m47s

there are actually a lot of people who can climb harder (on a rope) than alex honnold; he has done one 8c+; atm 350 people have done 9a or harder and a lot of people have done multiple 8c+ routes:

http://escalade9.wifeo.com/par-nationalite.php

i think what's so special about him are his mental abilities, not his physical.

Most (chinese/japanes) MA classes are loosely based around the teachings of Confucius.

The basics of his paedagogics are based on a family-like bond between Teachers and Students. Its very different to the western model of education be it the traditional western style or the "Progressive Education" or its latest incarnation.

Baden-Württenberg has even a Ad-Campain to recruit teachers from Berlin.

I think the question is: How big of a difference in living standard is acceptable in one Country.

Go to a public school in berlin, look at the toilets. Chances are very high they might be defect, stink and malfunctioning. I worked as a special eds teacher in Neukölln. We're supposed to train our students how to use the toilet. Half of the time the toilets in the first floor were broken. That means me had to stand in line for restrooms instead of doing some work. When the toilets got repaired after half a year the toilets in the basement broke down. Our students became very good at waiting in line.

Now i work in a school in the southwest of germany. If a toilet breaks down, chances are it will be repaired on the same day. If they need an external contractor in will take one day.

All of the students live in germany. Yet one get clean, functioning toilets, the others not.

(Fun fact: Berlin paid for my education, now Baden-Württenberg gets a university-trained teacher for free...)

nice ui.

i won't switch from meteoblue which has more features, a similar ui and more and much better models, at least for europe.

With mplayer and vlc you can manually adjust the cache size.

8mb worked quite well the last years

here are my experiences w/ owncloud.

settings: deployment behind a nginx, ldap login for the users.

rolling oc out was a nightmare. we tried several major releases, every time hoping things will be different.

both requirements caused a lot of trouble, we run into a lot of documented but unfixed bugs. they were often closed with the comment: ldap subsystem will be rewritten.

i thing we tested three times, each time a new major version. each time there was a new ldap system, but it was still broken.

exactly. sure i exported my rss feeds as opml to feedly and ttrss. but none of them worked like i expected it, so i stopped reading rss feeds.

i'm standing.

It's also possible and very easy to do this with python-dialog[0] or with whiptail[1] (no progress bar).

downside: both need external binarys.

[0]: http://pythondialog.sourceforge.net/ [1]: https://github.com/marwano/whiptail

yeah, to give more context. icons of the programs at that time would also be great.

That's great. Made me go back to to my early debian days with Potato CDs from the bookstore and a translation of "Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation and Usage". I Could'nt update to woody because it was too costly over the dialup line, so i bought the Woody CD set together with a Friend. Every time i had to install something i had to walk to his house and get the CDs, or pay lots of money (for me as a teenager at that time) to download the files.

Maybe you could add another Frame with Versions of Popular Packages? I'm Thinking KDE, Gnome, GCC, mayor scripting Languages Browsers and Editors?

i actually converted it to rtf and imported it then in MS Word (On OS X). I took care of pagination there.

Actually the Plan was to typeset it in Indesign, but as i woke up the day of the final layout i just decided to do it in Word.

Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made. I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly formatted chapters written with simplenote. 4) i also could seperate the chapters in files and keep everything in a git repo.

When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.

That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.

I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.

Writing

  \begin{itemize}
    \item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim 
  terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
    \item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
  \end{itemize}

is complicated and you can't read it well. this otoh is very easy to read:

  * really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is 
  better to read because it starts with a clear sign which 
  is recognized to be a bullet.
  * next line, which is also very long.

Easy readability is crucial, because i needed proof readers. The young proof readers could actually get the markdown code and correct my mistakes there (or write comments, starting with another fixme). really rocked with diff.

The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.

I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex. I agree, that for some people this is not the case.