Response to a mom who expressed concern about the social outgoingness of a young teen:
Consider the value of letting him be the star of his own life, even if it's quieter than you might like.
SandraDodd.com/introvert
photo by Ester Siroky
Learning is defined not just as sucking in information about something the child is interested in. Learning is also figuring out the big picture and how things connect. Figuring out how stuff works, figuring out how people work, making connections, seeing patterns. This is a mechanical, biological process. It's how humans—all learning animals really—naturally learn, how kids are born learning.
Natural learning is like a doorway. We can't change the doorway but we can change the outside world so kids can more easily reach what intrigues them.
But suppose I have a block about, say, world history; if I let my child lead, and she never thinks to think about world history, and I never bring it up because it bores me to tears, might she not be missing out on something she might like?My response:
Movies, historical novels, biographies, costumes, historical recipes, museums—it couldn't be that ALL those things would bore a parent to tears. Textbooks bore nearly EVERYONE to tears.
We paused - oh - probably at least 25 times during the documentary to look up things ranging from "When was the Bronze Age?" and "What exactly is Stonehenge anyway?" to "Who were the Normans?" and "How exactly big is England?" and "They killed the garrison... What's a garrison??"
We also paused a bunch of times as he described how he's going to be getting up early tomorrow to start work in Minecraft right away - he plans to build a motte-and-bailey timber castle, as described in the documentary. He asked me to keep the documentary in our Netflix queue so he can refer to it as needed for the particulars.
When the show ended, he stood up from the couch and proclaimed "That was AWESOME. And the whole time it was Spock. Spock just GIVING you interesting history stuff!!!"
It hit me right away that he didn't say "Spock teaching you history" or "A show teaching you history" or anything about teaching at all. He doesn't see things in terms of Being Taught. In his mind, he received a gift of new knowledge and facts this evening. A gift given by Spock, which made it all the better. 🙂
"Every person's learning about the world will be piecemeal - so it might as well be serendipitous and interest based."—Cally Brown
(original, on facebook)
During a drought, what is lacking?
The recommended answer: rain |