Diana E

I apologize if my correction of the spelling for
"grammar" offended anyone.

I have thought about this question of what's important
to teach. Personally, I feel the only important thing
to teach is that love is the law of life, that things
go better for the individual and everyone around
him/her if love is practiced on a practical level as
helpfulness and forgiveness, that gratitude brings
inner peace, and that patience is built from
forgiveness and persistence.

That said, I find that being in the world seems to
require some concession or adaptation to physical
survival and cultural systems. Even if your choice is
mostly avoidance, that still is adaptation and
concession to the existence of matter and culture.
One of the concessions I make to our culture is
imparting knowledge to my children, and some of the
educational choices I make are based solely on my
desire to help them feel they can converse
intelligently with all kinds of people. That would
include knowing what to call a noun and a verb, and
being able to obtain a GED. My younger daughter, who
has tended to be very good at math but totally
disinterested, feels at times that she is ignorant in
comparison to some others around her age, and those
are the times I put together new math workbooks or
find new math websites so she has the opportunity to
keep up with her age group as painlessly as possible.
Just recently I presented her with "All the Math
You'll Ever Need", a self-guided text which presents
math in all its practical applications. I also
spiral-bound a "workbook" of blank pages, with the
title of the math book and her name on the front, so
she can work on it at her own pace and have a tidy
journal for her practice problems. She rolled her
eyes and curled her lip, but she's using it and
letting me know when she wants help. I did point out a
couple of hightlights, like pi, which she had seen
reference to in another book, and how to use algebra
because "x" as an unknown came up in a movie we
watched.

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