Warning: This has nothing to do with either smut or sex.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m one of those \u201cother left\u201d people when I\u2019m following or giving directions. I\u2019ll 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\u2019m pointing. We occasionally get lost and frequently miffed. The thing is, when I\u2019ve 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. \u201cA gauche\u201d and I\u2019m pointing with my ring hand. \u201ca-lees\u2019r\u201d and the other hand is pointing. No problem. <\/span><\/p>\n I can only think I learned the words too young, before I had learned that the person gesturing in front of me wasn\u2019t a mirror image. I\u2019m sure that is one of the developmental stages a kid goes through quite young. I remember learning to shake hands. The instruction was \u201cGive me your right hand.\u201d My teacher (maybe my Dad \u2013 this seems like a dad sort of thing to teach) held out his right hand and I mirrored him. \u201cNo, the other hand, your right one.\u201d 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\u2019t work that way.<\/span><\/p>\n Pronouns are also a tricky thing that way. Jessica was playing with a sharp knife and Mom, in her excitement forgetting to call herself \u201cmommy\u201d says, in an attention grabbing way, \u201cYou give that knife to me right now.\u201d The knife quickly goes from Jessica to her. So \u201cme\u201d is Mom and \u201cyou\u201d stands for Jessica. Jessica, who was a very early talker, certainly by six months old, might see you eating cookies and demand \u201cGive it to you!\u201d and try to snatch the cookie off your plate. <\/span><\/p>\n The penny dropped one afternoon for Mom who was washing dishes. Jessica was playing in the cupboard under the counter. \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d said Jessica.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m washing dishes,\u201d said Mom.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cNo you are not,\u201d said Jessica. \u201cYou are playing with cockroaches.\u201d And she was.<\/span><\/p>\n Happily Jessica\u2019s mom was a language teacher. Once the problem was recognized it was a matter of setting up drilling situations to fix it.<\/span><\/p>\n With my own daughter it was \u201cobject permanence,\u201d that stage in which a child realizes that just because something is out of sight doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t there. She still wouldn\u2019t crawl, but bounced from room to room on her tush, head up, looking where she was going and moving with serious purpose. Clearly she\u2019d 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\u2019t get up to her room the same way, so she learned to crawl.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. \u201cI 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cA Separate Peace\u201d is a minefield of missed perceptions. By the same token first person books like \u201cOctober Sky\u201d and \u201cThe Secret Life of Bees\u201d 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\u2019s eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n Should teaching be withheld until the mind of each person is ready to deal with a perceptual shift? I don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019m one of those \u201cother … Continue reading