Insteressting... Verry insteresting... went to www.thefutureschannel.com and read Jaime Escalante's opinions on education. Very, very nuts & bolts; he even says that basically, psychology and education shouldn't be mixing as much as we do... that if we know how to teach, we can do psychology some other time. He also talks about how drugs keep kids from learning and cause bodily harm... and includes "school-administered Ritalin" in the mix. Probably a reasonable conclusion for him to draw based on his experiences but for a guy touting "prove things before you use them," he's accepting "proof" that kids shouldn't use Ritalin before he'd accept "proof" of other things, I suspect. On the other hand, I'm sure he'd say "where's the proof for Ritalin" and he would certainly have a valid point. On the third hand... when it's *you* the only proof you need is that it works... and fortunately you don't even need to inform that math teacher about it.
Anyway, it seems he's "landed" out there at the futures channel, which has a nice exercises for hands-on manipulative explanations. Most of the stuff is a little advanced for my folks which of course makes me wonder whether *if* they'd been taught that way *before* they left high school, it might not have been too advanced. Never know.