Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think.  It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.  Keltham was stupider, then, hopefully stupider than these people are now, because he sure doesn't want to spend years painstakingly teaching all this stuff, with like a dozen dozen dozen carefully composed exercises whose exact details he sure isn't going to remember exactly unless there's a spell for that.

Maybe he'll just, like... rapidly state as true, all the things that are true, and see if that just works for most things, before he tries to do anything more difficult than that?  In accordance with the classic dath ilani proverb-heuristic which says:  Try things the easy way first; if you succeed, you won't need to try them the difficult way; if you fail, you'll know the first part that makes it difficult instead of guessing that in advance.

The proverb itself puts Keltham in mind of the Child-Watchers who first spoke the proverb to him.  Mostly, of course, children learn from older children, but there are adults who know more to oversee the process, and prevent any semantic drift that might otherwise occur.  They are not full-fledged Keepers, those Child-Watchers, but they are in a profession that calls for an oath or three.  Children matter a lot, what happens to them is one of the causal lynchpins of everything else that makes Civilization work.  And the Watchers who specialize in teaching foundational subjects are those who are selected (among other qualities) for being able to hold very basic truths in reverence, and operate them with joy.

Keltham is not usually a reverent person, but it has never particularly occurred to him to question the attitudes that his Watchers took towards the deeper truths of reality and thought, when Keltham was a child.

Keltham remembers, then, how things are taught to children, especially those ideas too important and precise to be entrusted to the teaching of older-children alone; Keltham draws those feelings about himself.

Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think.  It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.  Keltham was stupider, then, hopefully stupider than these people are now, because he sure doesn't want to spend years painstakingly teaching all that stuff, with like a dozen dozen dozen carefully composed exercises whose exact details he can't possibly remember unless there's an intelligence-enhancing spell for that.

Maybe he'll just, like... rapidly state as true, all the things that are true, and see if that just works for most things, before he tries to do anything more difficult than that?  In accordance with the classic dath ilani proverb-heuristic which says:  Try things the easy way first; if you succeed, you won't need to try them the difficult way; if you fail, you'll know the first part that makes it difficult instead of guessing that in advance.

The proverb itself puts Keltham in mind of the Child-Watchers who first spoke the proverb to him.  Mostly, of course, children learn from older children, but there are adults who know more to oversee the process, and prevent any semantic drift that might otherwise occur.  They are not full-fledged Keepers, those Child-Watchers, but they are in a profession that calls for an oath or three.  Children matter a lot, what happens to them is one of the causal lynchpins of everything else that makes Civilization work.  And the Watchers who specialize in teaching foundational subjects are those who are selected (among other qualities) for being able to hold very basic truths in reverence, and operate them with joy.

Keltham is not usually a reverent person, but it has never particularly occurred to him to question the attitudes that his Watchers took towards the deeper truths of reality and thought, when Keltham was a child.

Keltham remembers, then, how things are taught to children, especially those ideas too important and precise to be entrusted to the teaching of older-children alone; Keltham draws those feelings about himself.

Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think.  It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.  Keltham was stupider, then, hopefully stupider than these people are now, because he sure doesn't want to spend years painstakingly teaching all that stuff, with like a dozen dozen dozen carefully composed exercises whose exact details he can't possibly remember unless there's an intelligence-enhancing spell for that.

Maybe he'll just, like... rapidly state as true, all the things that are true, and see if that just works for most things, before he tries to do anything more difficult than that?  In accordance with the classic dath ilani proverb-heuristic which says:  Try things the easy way first; if you succeed, you won't need to try them the difficult way; if you fail, you'll know the first part that makes it difficult instead of guessing that in advance.

The proverb itself puts Keltham in mind of the Watchers-of-Children who first spoke the proverb to him.  Mostly, of course, children learn from older children, but there are adults who know more to oversee the process, and prevent any semantic drift that might otherwise occur.  They are not full-fledged Keepers, those Child-Watchers, but they are in a profession that calls for an oath or three.  Children matter a lot, what happens to them is one of the causal lynchpins of everything else that makes Civilization work.  And the Watchers who specialize in teaching foundational subjects are those who are selected (among other qualities) for being able to hold very basic truths in reverence, and operate them with joy.

Keltham is not usually a reverent person, but it has never particularly occurred to him to question the attitudes that his Watchers took towards the deeper truths of reality and thought, when Keltham was a child.

Keltham remembers, then, how things are taught to children, especially those ideas too important and precise to be entrusted to the teaching of older-children alone; Keltham draws those feelings about himself.