***ORIGINALLY POSTED 30NOV08***
So my son, the one who is in speech therapy because he doesn't speak English, the one who will probably have to be put into a special preschool so that he can start kindergarten on time, shocked the crap out of me today. He was running around playing in the living room and looked up and noticed that my desktop was being used. I was remoted in from my laptop so I could manage some files and he could see what I was doing on the screen. He immediately ran over to me and looked at my laptop screen and could see that I was controlling the desktop. He looked at my monitor then pointed at the desktop and said something. It sounded important, but I don't speak his language. He then ran off doing whatever he had been doing before the interruption.
What stunned me was that he recognized that something was going on on the computer and that someone had to be controlling it. How does he have any frame of reference for this? How does he know that it's not just another "TC"? (His word for TV. Since he can't seem to close his mouth to form words, he alters them to sound close enough to the actual word but so he doesn't have to close his mouth.) How did he know that because something was happening on the desktop and his Mommy wasn't sitting there doing it that someone else had to be doing it?
More importantly how do I foster this? It's apparent that my kids are above average smart. Aurora sees patterns in things almost as fast as I do, and I see them faster than anybody I know. I'm not trying to be a braggart, I am genuinely concerned. My parents did a pretty decent job raising me. When I was younger they both worked with me to learn reading and math. Interestingly my Mom taught me to do things quite a bit differently than they taught in school, and it worked better. I got in trouble for doing math the way my Dad taught because I could shortcut out the work. My teachers would get pissed because I didn't show them HOW I got the right answer. It didn't matter that the answer was right, they wanted to see me get there. But when I was older, ten or eleven on up, they really couldn't spend time working on that kind of stuff. My brother was in the picture and they were getting divorced. Hell, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have done them any good even if they HAD the time. I did some stupid shit when I was younger and it saddens me to realize that I am just now beginning to realize the potential I once had. Hindsight is 20/20 they say. It's too bad foresight isn't at least 20/30. I see parents who stay at home and do nothing but push their kids, constantly teaching them new things, constantly testing them. And their kids are smart. But my kids are almost as smart (actually smarter in some areas) as they are and they don't have the benefit of the wife and I staying home and pandering to their every desire. Although you look at those kids as they grow up and you see that they may have book smarts, but not much else. What is the right mixture of teaching them intellectually and then teaching them about life? I saw a comic where the character said "Hold on a second... my common sense is tingling." The caption underneath - "Common sense: so rare it's a god damned super power." And it's really quite true. I've got a lot of common sense, but my wife makes me look like a dunce in that department. However, I've got her beat hands down in the intellectual stuff, generally speaking. I think that our kids will have the perfect mix of the two. Although Aurora sure has some problems with the common sense stuff sometimes. But then again, what six year old doesn't?
Another interesting thing to take from this. I talked to my Mom about what happened and she said something that gave me pause. "Kids are way more perceptive and intuitive than we give them credit for. Unfortunately we dumb it out of them." It's really true. When I was but a young lad one of my favorite games was Trivial Pursuit. I just barely met the minimum age required and I didn't really do great when we played, but I loved playing it. I learned so many things from those questions. I could beat the pants off anyone my age or even a few years older, but my parents generally won. I also became a walking encyclopedia of useless trivia. (Although I am learning that trivia isn't nearly as useless as I once thought. But I digress.) The point of this little side note is that I was watching "TC" the other night and saw a commercial for the "All new" Trivial Pursuit.... with Easy, Medium, and Hard questions. From a marketing aspect I guess it makes sense for them to do that. Nobody is smart anymore, in fact you are hated and feared if you are smarter than the status quo. But it just goes to show how we are dumbing this country down more and more. Have you watched that show "Are you smarter than a fifth grader"? It's truly sad how stupid some of the contestants are. Now some of the questions are a bit unfair (how many of us need to know the capitals of every state in the U.S. anymore?) but in general they go to show what a sad state of affairs we are in. What is causing this? On the outside it appears that our schools are getting better. My daughter comes home with homework in first grade that I don't remember doing until third or fourth grade. Yet she is missing some of the most basic steps in learning. Our kids are being bombarded with learning so much so fast that they are missing the foundational blocks needed to truly *understand* what it is that they are learning. They are taught to recognize words by sight instead of learning things like phonics so that they can learn HOW to pronounce the word. While this is fantastic at first, you realize later that when confronted with words they haven't seen before, they have no idea even where to begin trying to figure out the word. But they can program their DVRs to make sure not to miss a single episode of Spongebob Squareshorts. How do we get back to the fundamentals yet keep them abreast of the changing times?
I sure don't know the answer, but I am going to find out. Let me know if you've got it figured out.
No comments:
Post a Comment