An abacus, reading, laying concrete, and tossing pebbles

 An abacus, reading, laying concrete, and tossing pebbles

By Bobby Neal Winters

I got my grandsons an abacus for Christmas.

Well, that’s not true, actually.  I bought myself an abacus for Christmas, and I used my grandsons as an excuse to do this.  For those of you who know about such things, it is a Soroban, that is to say, a Japanese-style abacus as opposed to a Chinese style one.

I’ve gotten to be almost sixty years old and a math teacher no less without ever having learned how to use an abacus.

And there is something to know. It is not magic; it is a piece of technology.  Technological devices are fine things, but there is a two stage process involved with them.  First they are invented, and then you have to learn how to use them.  And the second part of this is the most important: Learning how to use it.

Think about the lever.  In some sense, it didn’t even have to be invented.  A level consists of a rock and a stick.  Rocks have been lying around literally since the Earth cooled.  Sticks have been around as long as there have been trees.  But we had to figure out how to use the lever.  We did. We refined it and invented the wheel from it; then gears and pulleys.  Now every toy monster truck that my grandsons go vroom, vroom, vroom with while smashing them against the living room floor in my how has wheels.

The children are exposed to them from before they can even speak.  They become an intuitive part of their lives.

This would be an example of a dissemination of technology that has worked.  We get the wheel; we get the lever.

I would like to think that reading is on its way to being this fully integrated.  It’s not quite, but we are working on it.  We are still having to teach that you need to read to your children.  All of the people in my circles do, but I recognize I am strange.  I get the feeling that reading books is not as ubiquitous as monster trucks, but I could be wrong.

Cultures that know about levers and wheels have possibilities open to them that those who don’t know do not. Cultures that know about reading have possibilities open to them do not.  If one or two people know how to read, they may have an advantage over others.  If everyone knows how to read it raises the baseline for everyone.

What happens in a child’s home has an out-sized effect on everything that follows in the child’s life.  My dad hauled bulk cement and helped build the interstates going though Oklahoma City and Dallas, and as a result I can’t walk past a pad of freshly poured concrete without thinking of him. A big slab of nicely worked concrete is a thing of beauty even though I’ve not been personally able to put this to use.

As a little boy, there were a lot of Chickasaws in my school.  They had a lot of throwing games where they threw small rocks and sticks.  They turned out to be the best at basketball and baseball, and I have to think it was because the technology of throwing was taught early.

A lot of what we do just comes to us as an accident of our history, but we do have the power to choose.  We can choose to make homes where learning skills is valued.  We can take the attitude that learning is a joy whether it is monster trucks, reading, laying concrete, throwing pebbles, or using an abacus.  It is a mixture of joy and discipline, and it pays off.

I’m done now.  I’ve got to go play with my abacus.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )