Watching a Lower Elementary student work with the Stamp Game is a reminder that strong math understanding is built from the ground up. 🧮
As this child solves 4‑digit addition, the material makes place value visible and tangible—each stamp representing a quantity that can be built, combined, and exchanged. Instead of memorizing steps, the student is actively thinking through how numbers work and how quantities come together. 🔢
What’s especially powerful about this work is the opportunity for self‑correction. The child can check their own thinking, notice mistakes, and make adjustments independently—building confidence, focus, and trust in their abilities. ✅
This concrete experience is an important step in the Montessori math journey, laying a strong foundation for logical reasoning and helping students gradually move toward abstraction. 👣✨
you have no idea how much i hate to say it, but damn it, it is the apps. the apps are the problem with the kids these days. with all the love from your friendly high school teacher, the problem is absolutely the fucking apps. hear me out (i promise, it's worth it)
see, the way it worked back when I was a baby, was that your mom and dad would buy you this big wooden plate with shapes cut out of it
and the shapes that were cut out would just be scattered around. and you would be like 9 months old. So you'd pick up the wooden plate and put it in your mouth and shit, but it didn't do anything and the actual shapes were so much easier to pick up, so you picked them up. and your fingers felt the soft curved edges and the pointy corners and the texture of the wood
and you tried to slam them into the wooden board and got frustrated when they didn't fit, but then you tried the star shape in the star shaped hole and it made a satisfying clunk sound and your mom would clap for you cause you made her happy and that made you happy. and you learned that each shape had its own place in the board
and over time and repetition you would associate the feeling of pointy with the look of pointy. and you'd be able to match up pointy bits. and curved bits. and round bits vs square bits. and soon you'd be able to fix the whole puzzle easily. and at the ripe age of [checks notes] 1, you had laid the foundations of problem-solving skills.
These days, we have an app for that.
But the app doesn't do all the leg work. The app goes tap, tap. Oh, it didn't work. Okay. tap, tap. ooh, yellow stars make baby happy! tap, tap. tap, tap. Sometimes the tapping works. sometimes it doesn't. baby isn't getting the same sensory input that helps them understand why the star shape didn't go into the square hole. There's nothing to feel. There might be nothing to hear. There's no satisfying feeling of the wood moving under your fingers and clicking into place.
tap, tap, tap, tap.
all that engagement for baby's brain is robbed. eventually, baby does learn the same outcome: circle goes into circle hole, triangle into triangle hole, but it takes so much longer and the information can't be retained easily. baby has learned facts and not skills. present baby with the same puzzle in different colours and you will even see that baby takes huge steps back in their understanding because the facts have changed.
fast-forward and baby is now 3 or 4 years old and is bored, but doesn't have the problem-solving skills to fix that. "Mom, i'm bored." and mom has an app for that. or a show. Mom has shit to do and she needs 3yo to not be in her hair for an hour, so long live peppa pig. mom grabs the ipad that hasn't been off since it first came out the box, opens netflix, puts on the kid's show, hands it back to 3yo. 3yo is entertained, having had to do absolutely nothing to fix their boredom but call on mom.
when I was 7 you had a bucket full of lego blocks, random fucking lego blocks, green yellow blue red white black, 4 prongs, 6, 8, all shapes and colours. and it was up to me to figure out what to do with the blocks. i could build anything i liked. and if i built too high it would fall over and i'd have to start again. but 7yos these days don't have big buckets of random blocks. they have a lego-set. the exact number of correct blocks to create a single item, and step by step instructions. they don't have to think about what to do with their new toy. they mindlessly assemble according to the instructions and then the toy is all done, the thing had been made.
so now you fast-forward and i've handed out word search puzzles to my 12yo students. and i've explained, with visuals on the board, what you're supposed to do with a word search puzzle. how it works. there's written instructions on the board, and on your worksheet as well. here are the words you're looking for. you'll need a pen or pencil or a marker. first one to find them all wins.
5 minutes later, nearly the whole class are on their phones.
and i go up to little johnny confused because, did you finish your word search already? and little johnny goes "i did my best". johnny has found 2 words in the puzzle. He's read each line from left to right and found two words, and circled them. that's 2 out of 15.
i ask him, did you read up and down for words? did you look at the list of words you were meant to find and did you try to locate those letters in the big search box? and little johnny looks at me like i've got three heads. 'no' says johnny. 'i don't know. i didn't know what i was meant to do.'
did you ask a friend to explain what you were meant to do? did you ask your teacher? did you read the instructions? 'no. i didn't know i was meant to ask somebody. (or: yes and my friend didn't know either!)' so johnny sat with an assignment he couldn't finish and to avoid feeling like he was 'too stupid', he found something he did understand. an app.
and the worst part is that little johnny really did do his best. some students didn't try at all. some couldn't even find the 2 words he did, even though they really tried. johnny has never not had the solution within hand's reach. johnny has never had to solve a problem himself, ever, and i can tell.
and then they grow a little bit more and mary is fifteen and has been in the girl's bathroom for over two hours now. one of her friends is worried enough that she tells me, and I go in. mary feels sick and is in a stall, weak after throwing up cause her period sucks. it hadn't occurred to mary to ask a friend for help, or to go to the nurse, or take herself home, or get a tablet for her cramps, or ask somebody for a tampon. she texted her mom, 'i'm sick', but her mom's at work with her phone on silent. mary didn't know asking somebody else for help was even an option. it takes twenty minutes of pointed questions before i even find out she's on her period, because when i ask her, 'what do you think made you sick?' she tells me she doesn't know. she's never had to think about why.
and now alexleigh is eighteen and their parents have helped them move into a dorm on campus and it's all up to them and they just sit on their bed without the sheets on, staring at nothing, because, well, now what? eventually their stomach starts to grumble. that means they need food. they open the fridge, but there's no food in there, because they never bought any food. they're hungry. there's an app for that. some of their tight student budget is handed over to ubereats just so they can have dinner. it doesn't occur to them to set an alarm so they can get to the morning lecture on time. and even if they did set the alarm, they would need to have the forethought to factor in how much time it will take them to get ready in the morning and find their way to class, rather than just set their alarm for the moment the lecture starts.
when their professor asks why they are late, they will say the same thing they've always said. "I don't know."
and it's not their fucking fault. they've been robbed of problem-solving skills since their infancy. they've never had to think their way around a problem. they've never had to entertain themselves. when they have no instructions, they simply shut down.
my macbook isn't working. the screen is dark.
did you charge it?
i don't know.
do you think you should try charging it? maybe it's just out of juice.
i don't know.
where's your charging cable?
i don't know.
find your charging cable.
but i don't know where it is!?
you have to look for it.
where?
where do you usually store your charging cable?
in my bag.
okay. look inside your bag.
oh, my charging cable is here.
okay! [...] try charging your macbook.
oh, it's working now! Thank you!
this is the kind of conversation you are meant to have with a five year old. This is not the kind of conversations that should be happening with 13 year olds, but it is. en masse. these kids aren't stupid. they aren't disabled, at least, not in the way we think of disability. they have full brain function. the same function i had at their age. but they were never, ever taught problem solving skills. so they are constantly left floundering with nothing to do. and you know what? there's an app for all that free time.
it's like we are asking them to explain the theory of relativity to us, but we forgot to teach them addition and subtraction. they can count to 10 and we figured that was enough. so now you have whole classes of kids who constantly feel like they are too stupid for school. their teachers make them feel stupid. thank heavens, they've assigned an essay. there's an app that will write it for them.
and it's nobody's fault. having kids is like fighting in the trenches. you need 2 full time incomes to make a single child thrive. your body and mind are wrecked by the time you clock out. BESIDES - how are you, the parent, supposed to know that the app version of the wooden puzzle won't deliver the same results and will have long-lasting consequences? unless you studied child- or brain-development in tertiary education, you probably won't know. And even if somebody tells you: once won't kill them. twice won't hurt. where is the boundary? how are you meant to stay on top of all the developmental milestones?
but i've had to help thirteen-year-old kids navigate a panic attack because they were asked to write with a pencil and not a pen, and they'd never used a pencil to write words before, so the pencil remained where it lay on their desk while the pressure of but now i'm not doing the assignment mounted in their brain.
i've helped ten year olds out of tears because it had been so long since they had held a real book and not a kindle, they didn't know you had to physically move the page over rather than press a button.
so yeah. it's the fucking apps. insidious. painful. i am so sorry. every single of you deserved so much more. so did your parents. idk how to fix it. but it is, definitely, absolutely, for fucking sure, the apps
Hello! I must say that your blog has helped me A lot in my journey of self-improvement! I have a problem with myself,I need reflections on. I'm an INFJ that has PTSD (lifelong abuse) and borderline. I'm a third culture kid and have been aching for stability for years. And most of the countries I've lived in don't have mental health resources so I have been walking on egg shells and put my mental health on hold. For 2 years I lived in my parents home country while my family still lived in asia-p1
[con’t: After that I realized that I could not make it my country, I couldn’t study what I wanted in university or work because of the language. I came to the conclusion that sooner or later I needed to establish my life somewhere so last year I decided to go to the country where I spent most of my life in (Norway). Because of my PTSD most of my life is repressed, but after living there for almost a year it has been extremely triggering. It was dark, cold and I was completely alone, and it made me fall into depressive thoughts, worsened my Mental health. And because of my poor mental health I had very hard time taking care of myself. I was also struggling economically, and combining this with my childhood triggers it became a nightmare. I was in a waiting list for ages, and when I got help from the psychologist to get help with my ptsd and borderline, she told me that the constant moving have affected me and I need to find stability in a country, she told me to think about itThe problem is that no matter how much I think about it, it doesn’t get better. Instead I find myself very anxious and having panic attacks bc I feel like I need things decided. The thing is that I have realized that planning things inside my head is one thing and reality is completely different. Something else I’ve realized is that I need to have people in my life, it helps me to cope. I have also high expectations from my family to finish my studies but its hard in the mental space I am in]
I’m not sure if there was another message at the end that I didn’t receive since it ended somewhat abruptly, but I get the picture. Yes, third culture kids often suffer from a feeling of having no roots and thus no real home, which of course is made much worse by existing in an abusive home that has never made them feel welcome. Roots are important because they provide stability and a sense of security, it’s something you can rely on and go back to in times of need. Unfortunately, since your parents didn’t help establish roots for you, you are now tasked with doing that for yourself as an adult. INFJs need a “social home” to belong to, a place with people who provide moral and emotional support, and your mental health issues are directly attributable to the fact that you’ve never had that kind of social support in your life. You understand the crux of the problem, which is good.
I’m a little bit dismayed that your psychologist simply asked you to “think about it” because it’s technically their job to help you think through problems by teaching you strategies rather than just send you home to do it yourself - if you could solve the problem yourself, you would have done so already. To be fair, psychologists are human too, and they can get overwhelmed when a new client comes in and immediately unloads a whole boatload of complicated problems that need sorting out.
You say that the more you think about it, the worse it gets. The reason for that is your “thinking” isn’t real thinking, it’s merely rumination, which means that you just go over the problem again and again without getting anywhere and it makes you feel worse for never accomplishing anything (see the article on rumination). Proper thinking is systematic, critical, strategic, goal-oriented, and targeted to solving problems effectively and efficiently. It seems that you lack the skill to think in such a way (Ti loop), so your thinking is unproductive.
You’ve raised a lot of problems in a short description. They all need solving, it’s true, but you have to prioritize them, which you haven’t done. You should make a list of all the major problems in your life that need solving. Then you should order those problems from most urgent to least important. If you can’t solve one problem without first tackling another, then that other problem needs to be moved up the priority list. Then you should tackle them in order, be systematic.
Next: For each problem, you have to 1) identify the exact cause of the problem, then 2) brainstorm possible solutions, then 3) identify which solution is the most effective one, i.e., the one that is feasible and tackles the root cause(s). If you have trouble with identifying the cause of the problem, brainstorming solutions, or judging/deciding which idea is the best solution, then you research and ask for advice from those who are more knowledgeable and experienced than you. When you’re able to clarify your problems, you’ll have a better idea of who to ask, and the people you ask for advice will have a better time helping because they have a better idea of what you need.
According to the description, I’d say your most immediate and urgent problem is finishing your studies, though that’s not the most important problem in the grand scheme of your life. If the main obstacle in finishing your studies is that your mental health suffers from lack of social support, then the first problem you should tackle is the social support. Brainstorm solutions. Maybe you need to see a counselor to process your feelings regularly and keep you on track. Maybe you can join a student support group. Maybe you can join a depression or anxiety support group. Maybe you can call a free mental health hotline or write to a mental health forum to talk out your feelings. Maybe you can join clubs or activities to make friends. If there are people you trust, maybe you can do more to develop those relationships and lean on them a bit more instead of trying to go it alone. You can meet new people by asking friends to introduce you to their other friends.
Tackle the social support problem first since it will help you with everything else. Then your studies should improve. If you have to slow down and take fewer courses because you need more time to care for your mental health, then do it. Once your studies are finished, you’ll be in a better position to make a living. Then you’ll be more free to move around and look for a place to settle down and make your home. There’s no need to overwhelm yourself by thinking about ALL the problems ALL the time. Draw a linear mental map that lays out your strategy for addressing the problems systematically, one by one, then you can focus all your attention on the problem at hand instead of always getting too far ahead of yourself and feeling drowned in anxiety about the future. In other words, when you know your general direction, you can focus on what you need to do today to move in that direction (healthy Ni).
Inner turmoil has been filling up inside of me and sloshing around like a toxic potion. A less edgy way of putting it is I recently was told to stop stimming out in public by an autistic person. It was really hurtful and to be honest it felt like that metaphor “the pot calling the kettle black”.
What happened was I was at lunch and I was stimming. I’ve learned to hide that but it feels awful when I do it. So recently as an exercise in self-acceptance, I started publicly stimming again. Which looks like a lot of body movements and shaking for me because I have this vibrating feeling side of me that’s shaking up my insides. Normally I hide it by clenching my body as tightly as I can and focusing my energy into clenching my fists as well.
A slightly more noticeable form of me stimming is I clench my fists and do something similar that a hamster does to grooming its face because it makes the stimming feeling go away faster but also lets me stim at the same time. Recently, someone, I go to school with at my all autism program asked me what was wrong when he saw me do it in the college campus cafeteria. I kindly explained to him nothing I was just stimming then he told me to, “Stop stimming in public before people see you, you aren’t supposed to do that.” I’ll note that our campus isn’t only for autistic people we are just a part of a program for autistic people to have a college education. I then said to him that we are in all in a program that lets us be autistic. I’ve been masking my whole life and I felt comfortable enough to do it in front of everyone because I thought other autistic people would understand. He got real quiet after that.
I was ready to hit the fan at that point. I was also frustrated at the moment because he does things that I consider apart of his own autism that can be annoying and noticeable but I don’t say anything because I don’t want to hurt his feelings and it’s not my place. I also don’t want him to think I see his autism as all negative traits and even if he has some annoying traits to me that doesn’t me he doesn’t have the right to not do them. Because overall like my stimming they are apart of who he is and don’t hurt anybody.
For example, he’ll keep repeating jokes because he doesn’t get people don’t find them funny. Yet I don’t tell him to stop telling jokes and be more socially aware because I know he can’t help it and that would be fucked up. Or the fact that he constantly interrupts my friends and hogs my attention. To be quite frank I think he’s got a bit of a crush on me too. Apart of me just hopes it’s me over analogizing things but I don’t think that’s it.
I don’t know what to do because I want to be considerate but he’s starting to really push my buttons. I’ve already told the staff/teachers, he’s too close to me and they normally help me out when I’m feeling overwhelmed. He’s starting to annoy my other friends and I. I feel like I should talk to him and tell him I don’t really want him to always talk to me so much. At the same time I don’t want to hurt his feelings because I also know what it’s like to be in his shoes.What should I do?
Botley helps your child learn early STEM skills while playing and having fun. He teaches kids to code with active, screen-free play that’s perfect for promoting critical thinking and problem solving skills
Botley is ready to code right out of the box and will have your kid coding in minutes
Botley features completely screen-free coding – no phone or tablet required. Botley’s easy-to-use remote programmer transmits your commands and sends him rolling
Botley’s smart logic lets him detect objects in front of him – and avoid them. He can also follow looping commands, take on obstacle courses, and follow black-line paths. He even has hidden features to unlock
Botley’s 77-piece activity set comes with a remote programmer, detachable robot arms, 40 coding cards, 6 double-sided tiles, 27 obstacle building pieces and a starter guide with coding challenges
Botley is great for children as young as 5, but with his advanced features, he can grow with them for many fun years together
Exploring triangles with the Geometry Cabinet sparks curiosity and a love of learning! As a student matches each shape to its card, they’re developing attention to detail, fine motor control, and an understanding of geometry—all while having fun. These early experiences help children think critically and prepare for more advanced math concepts later on.
