Warning: This has nothing to do with either smut or sex.
There are some types of knowledge, that, if acquired too soon, you spend a lifetime re-learning. Take your left and right hands, for instance. I’m one of those “other left” people when I’m following or giving directions. I’ll be pointing one way and saying the opposite direction. My husband, who appropriately keeps his eyes on the traffic, has a hair trigger reaction to turning and follows what I say instead of where I’m pointing. We occasionally get lost and frequently miffed. The thing is, when I’ve been speaking French or Arabic (not to him but in other countries and other lives) I never mix up the words for left and right. “A gauche” and I’m pointing with my ring hand. “a-lees’r” and the other hand is pointing. No problem.
I can only think I learned the words too young, before I had learned that the person gesturing in front of me wasn’t a mirror image. I’m sure that is one of the developmental stages a kid goes through quite young. I remember learning to shake hands. The instruction was “Give me your right hand.” My teacher (maybe my Dad – this seems like a dad sort of thing to teach) held out his right hand and I mirrored him. “No, the other hand, your right one.” I learned that to grasp each others right hands my arm would cross my body, rather than shoot directly across the space between us. Mirrors didn’t work that way.
Pronouns are also a tricky thing that way. Jessica was playing with a sharp knife and Mom, in her excitement forgetting to call herself “mommy” says, in an attention grabbing way, “You give that knife to me right now.” The knife quickly goes from Jessica to her. So “me” is Mom and “you” stands for Jessica. Jessica, who was a very early talker, certainly by six months old, might see you eating cookies and demand “Give it to you!” and try to snatch the cookie off your plate.
The penny dropped one afternoon for Mom who was washing dishes. Jessica was playing in the cupboard under the counter. “What are you doing?” said Jessica.
“I’m washing dishes,” said Mom.
“No you are not,” said Jessica. “You are playing with cockroaches.” And she was.
Happily Jessica’s mom was a language teacher. Once the problem was recognized it was a matter of setting up drilling situations to fix it.
With my own daughter it was “object permanence,” that stage in which a child realizes that just because something is out of sight doesn’t mean it is gone forever. That clicked for her when she was about six or seven months old. She had shown no interest in crawling. She would sit up on her own, but rather screech for someone to set her upright. I was both irritated and worried. Suddenly she was whipping back the blanket covering a toy. She was asking for things that were in a different room, saying the name of people who weren’t there. She still wouldn’t crawl, but bounced from room to room on her tush, head up, looking where she was going and moving with serious purpose. Clearly she’d had no reason to crawl until she had somewhere she wanted to go. And crawling? The stairs did that for her. She was fine sliding from step to step on her way down, but she couldn’t get up to her room the same way, so she learned to crawl.
On a grander scale I see the same thing in the classroom. The situation is complicated because you are not dealing with a single child, judging their cognitive stage at the moment. You are dealing with a bunch of kids all at different stages. The teacher’s job is as much to level the playing field by explaining how to get from one stage to another. This is certainly true with helping kids move from concrete to abstract thinkers. With the majority of freshmen, what you see is what you get. Learning to make and recognize inferences is huge. Sherlock Holmes is helpful in this with his astute observations. “I see you come from Bournemouth because your shoes are muddy and your briefcase is sporting a clean stripe where it was rubbing against the luggage carrier in the train.” That sort of thing. Looking at clues like that is nearly concrete; Holmes does an admirable job of connecting the dots. It becomes harder when students need practice in seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Poverty, fear, and ignorance are states they recognize in themselves, but not others. How they react to those characteristics is something else again. They might see Holden Caulfield as a hero for the ages, while an adult might see him as a whiney spoiled brat. And reading “A Separate Peace” is a minefield of missed perceptions. By the same token first person books like “October Sky” and “The Secret Life of Bees” are written in the voices of characters who are aware of their own prejudices, and who have made the leap to being able to see things through another’s eyes.
Should teaching be withheld until the mind of each person is ready to deal with a perceptual shift? I don’t think so, certainly not by the time kids reach high school, and certainly not when kids have finally reached the stage of observing themselves as learners.
