Learning how to learn
Duchess learns best in a social environment. (The internet tells me that she has an "interpersonal" learning style.) Put her into a group of any size, and she is galvanized, becoming engaged, focused, and motivated. Take away the human interaction, and she loses interest. She'll still plug through whatever she's required to do, but there's no joy in it and no spark. She comes up with ideas for projects and activities all the time, but she doesn't follow through with them unless she's able to engage somebody else.
As Cook and I have increasingly recognized this, we've been thinking about ways she can leverage this tendency in herself. (Study groups! Team sports!) One thing that has surprised me, possibly because I'm extremely old, is that she can feed off the social interaction even when it's not in person. She has been working on a few projects in Scratch, a simple drag-and-drop programming language, on the MIT site, which encourages users to share their projects. Cook and I have encouraged this, because we want her to be able to get a job. The first time she worked on a Scratch project for a few hours, I was baffled by her persistence. Then she begged to check the Scratch site that evening to see "how many pageviews" her project had gotten, and I realized that the social element of working on a project in the cloud is enough to keep her rolling. Yesterday (home with a bad cold) she was delighted to find that other people had starred her projects, and one person had "remixed" one of her projects. She spent several hours working on a new project, and we had to pry her away to eat dinner and then to go to bed. I never, ever thought that I would have to pry Duchess away from coding. From coding!*
This is a mystery to me. I'm pretty much a social learner myself, but while I love having my blog posts viewed and commented by people I know, and I enjoy interacting with strangers in real life, I have no interest in interacting with strangers on the web. The privacy settings on my various social media accounts are set fairly restrictively. I don't use Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram.* Duchess doesn't feel this way. She's a modern person, and she's going to grow up interacting with strangers on the web. She's going to be posting tutorials on YouTube any minute now. This is probably a good thing for a person who learns socially, but I'm doing a little mental scramble to try to catch up.
At Duchess's kung fu program, she has a little clique with two other girls her age. They act like a parody of nine-year-old girls in a clique - they shriek excitedly when they see each other, and hold hands and jump up and down. She lights up when she's with them. A few months ago, she and her favorite clique member did a "holds" form together for a tournament, and they got together for a practice session at the studio on the weekend, in some unused practice space. They had no coaching, but they didn't mess around, they worked hard on what they were supposed to do, and they had so much fun together. It was a pleasure to see. I hope that Duchess is able to deploy that joyful collaborative approach throughout her life. Even if it is sometimes online.
* Admittedly, I have no delusions of privacy on the web, and I'm fairly promiscuous about handing my credit card number over to strangers over the web.
**Though, to be clear, she's not exactly engaged in knotty programming problems. She mostly creates narrative stories, and spends a lot of time trying to decide what costume the character should wear.
As Cook and I have increasingly recognized this, we've been thinking about ways she can leverage this tendency in herself. (Study groups! Team sports!) One thing that has surprised me, possibly because I'm extremely old, is that she can feed off the social interaction even when it's not in person. She has been working on a few projects in Scratch, a simple drag-and-drop programming language, on the MIT site, which encourages users to share their projects. Cook and I have encouraged this, because we want her to be able to get a job. The first time she worked on a Scratch project for a few hours, I was baffled by her persistence. Then she begged to check the Scratch site that evening to see "how many pageviews" her project had gotten, and I realized that the social element of working on a project in the cloud is enough to keep her rolling. Yesterday (home with a bad cold) she was delighted to find that other people had starred her projects, and one person had "remixed" one of her projects. She spent several hours working on a new project, and we had to pry her away to eat dinner and then to go to bed. I never, ever thought that I would have to pry Duchess away from coding. From coding!*
This is a mystery to me. I'm pretty much a social learner myself, but while I love having my blog posts viewed and commented by people I know, and I enjoy interacting with strangers in real life, I have no interest in interacting with strangers on the web. The privacy settings on my various social media accounts are set fairly restrictively. I don't use Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram.* Duchess doesn't feel this way. She's a modern person, and she's going to grow up interacting with strangers on the web. She's going to be posting tutorials on YouTube any minute now. This is probably a good thing for a person who learns socially, but I'm doing a little mental scramble to try to catch up.
At Duchess's kung fu program, she has a little clique with two other girls her age. They act like a parody of nine-year-old girls in a clique - they shriek excitedly when they see each other, and hold hands and jump up and down. She lights up when she's with them. A few months ago, she and her favorite clique member did a "holds" form together for a tournament, and they got together for a practice session at the studio on the weekend, in some unused practice space. They had no coaching, but they didn't mess around, they worked hard on what they were supposed to do, and they had so much fun together. It was a pleasure to see. I hope that Duchess is able to deploy that joyful collaborative approach throughout her life. Even if it is sometimes online.
* Admittedly, I have no delusions of privacy on the web, and I'm fairly promiscuous about handing my credit card number over to strangers over the web.
**Though, to be clear, she's not exactly engaged in knotty programming problems. She mostly creates narrative stories, and spends a lot of time trying to decide what costume the character should wear.
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