At last night's math expo at Clear Spring School, teachers shared their methods for teaching fractions at the various grade levels, illustrating for parents the scope and sequence used in teaching our children. One of the questions that a parent brought up was the use of the hands in counting. She remembered from her own early schooling, seeing children hiding their fingers under the desks as they counted in the solution of math problems.

The movement in thinking from the concrete (symbolized by fingers) to the abstract (where solutions are derived in the mind alone) is a sign of mastery that comes through varying amounts of repetition and use. But it can't be pushed. You can see in the the hiding of hands under desks in nearly every mathematics classroom in America that the use of the hands in counting and in the development of abstract thought is suppressed. The consequence is that children are taught to not like math, and to doubt or become unconscious of their own abilities. In fact, MRI scanning of the brain reveals that as students solve math problems, the same parts of the brain are active as would be if the fingers were in motion.

If we consider what we now know about the movement of the hands in the development of thought, you can see that putting the fingers back in classroom math would be a very good thing.