Doing Time

For everything there is a season……half his life ago J11 spent a long time “playing around” with the concept of TIME. He was given a stopwatch for Christmas when he had just turned seven.

This stopwatch hung around his neck for two years straight – he used it all the time to work out how long it took us to do the shopping, how long car trips were, how long sermons lasted, even how long it took to fill a vial of blood at the doctor’s!!! It seemed he was always checking the time and by the time he was seven, he had a very thorough understanding. His older sister who had used a maths textbook for one year had a different experience. Firstly, she had no apparent interest in time…..so long as there was enough of it each day to play with her dolls and read her books! The textbook we had used devoted one week’s worth of lessons to the concept and when we were “up to that chapter” she dutifully filled out the pages and I considered we had “done” time. In fact, I thought we had done very well because I got a *real* clock out to use! But brother’s understanding at that stage was far deeper than hers…another year later and she became interested and with no apparent effort “got it” almost overnight. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, leap years, twenty-four hour clock, digital, analogue.

Real life is a great teacher. Waiting for the right time is a discipline.
Waiting is simple........letting learning happen is simple.......in fact it seems too simple when people ask if you've started school yet this year (we're learning all the time) or which maths book you use (we don't before age 11 or 12).
Intricate simplicity.