Beauty surrounds us. A sunrise over a mountain top, a leaf clinging to an autumn branch. Nature offers a bountiful feast, we merely have to seek it out.
Charlotte Mason understood the beauty in nature for she desired children to have a “joy of seeing”. Too many times we replace the joy of seeing with our joy of telling.
We are awaking to the use of nature-knowledge, but how we spoil things by teaching them! We are not content that children should know the things of nature as we know our friends, by their looks and ways, an unconscious comprehensive knowledge which sinks in by dint of much looking, but we set them to fragmentary scraps of scientific research. They intend investigation, and lose the joy of seeing. Their attention is concentrated upon this or that, and they lose the all-round alertness which is the chief equipment of the nature-student. We shall awake some day and find that nature-study, as we have taught it, adds not at all to the joy of life. The child of the future will feel no thrill at the disclosure of the red under the tail of a little brown bird; now, every small boy likes to know such things, and it will be a weary day when we have ‘nature-studied’ such knowledge out of existence.
Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series -vol 5 pg 395
It is our joy of telling which destroys the beauty. Discovery is a marvelous delight. It allows a child to see the world in a new way, to understand more deeply. However, discovery cannot occur without observation. Telling corrodes observational joy.
I think the same thing applies with mathematics. Children are told the facts, told how to use numbers, told how to write the equations but seldom are they left to their own devices to merely observe and discover. We ask them to describe what they see in nature, but seldom do we specifically ask them to describe the patterns nature reveals.
It’s the patterns in mathematics that make it beautiful. Ignore the slashes of symbols and blots of numbers, focus upon the patterns and God’s creation will be revealed. Allow Him to use the beauty in nature and math to speak. Allow Him to demonstrate that random is not as random as we wish to believe.
Have you ever used the beauty of nature to study math? Where did it lead?