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How are children able to see what we can’t?
We hold on to the burning idea of believing that the child does not actually recognize the numbers in math dots and that he does not actually see the number but the way that the dots are positioned. But any child that is one year old and that is valued and those that have not yet been tricked to recognizing the symbols before recognizing the actual data, is capable of seeing at first sight any set of 79 math dots, or any amount, in whatever way these numbers are positioned, is the same thing: they all equal to the same amount. One thing that we the adults can only see is if the number 79 is presented to us in the actual number, not in dots. Children do not allow themselves to be fooled and see only the truth, independently from the way it is presented to them, whereas we adults have to cou
nt the points if these were showed to us in any random position or we would have to run to multiplication if it was presented to us in columns. In this way, if we were to present the information in this way we would resolve the problem by counting the dots, where a little child is able to see the truth by simple glancing at it. If we were to present a number in the form of columns we adults would have to count the amount of columns there are and then count how many dots there are in a column and would then need to work out the corresponding multiplication. This process is very slow and does not have hardly any virtue that makes it recommended, except for the fact that it allows it to come to a final concrete result. However, even when we have obtained the right result, which in this example could be 50, we actually have no idea what the number 50 actually means, if it is not by comparison with any other thing, like the amount of dollars that one makes a day or the number of days that there are in a month plus twenty. The child knows the absolute truth though and this could be two randomly mixed cards of math dots that are both equal to 50 and the child would be able to see it clearly. Without having to give estimates or anything of the sort. |