Week 6: Date, Time, and Place Value

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Interestingly enough, the concept of triangulation I used to help Billy understand time last week was instrumental in helping him to understand the concept of place value.

Just like year, month, and day help you pinpoint a date; and hour, minute, and second help you pinpoint a time; so too do the ones, tens, and hundreds places of a number help you pinpoint a quantity.

Monopoly money be damned. 

As a follow-on to this thought, consider the idea that a thing is so much more than the sum of its parts. The ones, tens, and hundreds place of a number is a good way of representing a quantity, but ultimately, the quantity is so much more than just the sum of its place values, just like time as a concept is so much more than what the Gregorian calendar or a grandfather clock can articulate. 

Of course, I kept this last thought to myself, out of fear that such an insight at such an early age would have caused Billy's head to explode. Hopefully, one day, when he's more mature, he'll read this blog, and smile. =)

To the future!

Week 5: Unstuck In Time (so it goes)

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“What time did you get out of school today?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?

“I don’t know.”

When I first met Billy, he was lost in time. That is to say, he couldn't tell time, much less make any sense of past, present, or future.  Some would argue that he wasn’t lost as much as he was free—free from the mental chains of linear time. You see, Billy’s conception of the time-space continuum was such that everything that ever was, is or will be—simply is. Like a first year Spanish student learning how to conjugate verbs for the very first time, the conjugation of his experiences was limited to a single tense: the present.
 

But I am a product of the machine, and so too Billy must grow to be. In the machine, to be “free from time” is a radical concept—too radical a concept. Billy must know time.
 

To teach him, I broke up the abstract concept of time into two discrete pieces: date and clock-time. Date, I explained, is triangulated from three pieces of information: the year, the month, and the day.  Clock-time, I explained, is also triangulated from three pieces of information: the hour, the minute, and the second. “Together,” I explained, “date and time tell you when something happened, is happening, or will happen.” 

And with that, Billy’s fate was sealed.