Mitch Resnick on THINKING

In Resnick's 1994 book, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams - Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, he writes about StarLogo as a tool for exploring ways of thinking about things. In the chapter on New Turtle Geometry he discusses "two major reasons for developing new ways of doing geometry." 

Heck, it's not just geometry to which these lines apply! 

 

First, different people find different approaches more accessible. … Too often, schools give special status to particular ways of thinking about mathematical and scientific ideas. By privileging certain types of thinking, they exclude types of thinkers.

Second, everyone can benefit from learning multiple ways of thinking about things. Understanding something in just one way is a rather fragile kind of understanding. Marvin Minsky has said that you need to understand something at least two different ways in order to really understand it. Each way of thinking about something strengthens and deepens each of the other ways of thinking about it. Understanding something in several different ways produces an overall understanding that is richer and of a different nature than any one way of understanding.

Summer :-)

Swimming with my husband out doors in the summer is as close to perfect as it can get! Our neighborhood of 200 homes has a community pool situated on a tip of land surrounded on one side by the harbor and the other by Long Island Sound. We've taken to swimming in the morning when, as you'll see, the pool is usually empty save for us. Our 20-year old got a kick out of seeing our synchronicity. We were in laps 4 and 5 of what would be our standard 54 (3/4 of a mile). The further along in our distance, the more in synch and faster we get. Self-critic's view…warming up is no excuse for sloppy leg work ;-)

The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

 

Wendy Mogel is a psychologist who focused her efforts on counseling harried families looking for help with child rearing. Frustrated by her sense that efforts to provide assistance to families was not yielding satisfactory solutions for them or for her, she went in search of other approaches to add to her tool bag. Eventually she found her way to Judaism's teachings, from which she distilled nine blessings, and she relays her story and the blessings in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee.

Mogel's book had been on my radar for awhile, but I had been reluctant to read it, as I thought it might be overly dogmatic when it came to pushing a religious approach to parenting. The full name is The Blessing of a Skinned Knee – Using Jewish Teaching to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Turns out, I was rather off in my uninformed pre-assessment!

The ideas Mogel espouses resonate with me on two levels – as a parent and as a teacher. Essentially, she is saying that kids thrive when they are given time to be themselves (curious, relaxed, introverted, extroverted, loud, quiet, exploratory, playful – you get the idea). However, they do need consistent and tempered boundaries to help them develop into mindful adults. Not too many of us would disagree with either of these ideas. With that said, Mogel has run into many parents who, often with good intentions, are trying to mold their children into something other than what their children are. And these same parents are attempting to discipline via democratic principles and seeing themselves as friends with their children, rather than placing a stake in the ground as the adults in charge of child rearing.

As Mogel delved into the study of Judaism, she encountered many tenets that she could apply to her counseling practice, and she presents the tenets as blessings described in a straight-forward, non-reproachful style, complete with anecdotes and personal reflections. She is not lecturing, just sharing guidance. Here are the nine blessings:

  1. The Blessing of Acceptance: Discovering Your Unique and Ordinary Child
  2. The Blessing of Having Someone to Look Up To: Honoring Mother and Father
  3. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Why God Doesn't Want You to Overprotect Your Child
  4. The Blessing of Longing: Teaching Your Child an Attitude of Gratitude
  5. The Blessing of Work: Finding the Holy Sparks in Ordinary Chores
  6. The Blessing of Food: Bringing Moderation, Celebration, and Sanctification to Your Table
  7. The Blessing of Self-Control: Channeling Your Child's Yetzer Hara
  8. The Blessing of Time: Teaching Your Child the Value of the Present Moment
  9. The Blessings of Faith and Tradition: Losing Your Fear of the G Word and Introducing Your Child to Spirituality

 

Two notes on the blessings. The first has to do with #3, which is also the book title. I once heard an independent school head share an anecdote about summer vacation. In the process of exiting a building, the head was walking down a short flight of steps, when suddenly the head tripped and fell. Ultimately, the head was okay, but the lesson the head chose to share with faculty was "You can never be too careful." That lesson always struck me as being conservative and overprotective; it left no room for risk taking, exploration, discovery. The lesson I would have taken is "You can fall down and get up again." Hence, Mogel's Blessing of a Skinned Knee.

The second note relates to #7. If you are like me, the term Yetzer Hara is not in your daily vocabulary. Yetzer Hara is the "impulse for evil" and is balanced by the Yetzer Tov, "impulse for good". Mogel explains that the yetzer hara is a positive because "it is made up of some of our most robust traits. Curiosity, ambition, and passionate desire all derive their energy from the yetzer hara. … While the yetzer hara should be treated with extreme watchfulness, it must not be eliminated…it is our juice, our spark, our zip." Hence, as parents we need to learn how to help our children channel their yetzer hara energy.

For more of my thoughts about this book, I invite you to read The Blessing of a Skinned Knee on my yogajournal blog.

Guests of the Sheik

I picked up Guests of the Sheik over December vacation, after family had headed home. With the start of school looming. I was starved for a book to read, and found this one lying around on the kitchen counter. As one of the books for a course in Cultural Anthropology taken by our younger son, he had shared the book with his older brother, and there it was on the table, calling to me. At first, based purely on the title, I thought it was a work of fiction, and picked it up to read the blurb on the back cover.

A delightful, extremely well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, Guests of the Sheik is an account of the author's two-year stay in the tiny rural village of El Nahra in southern Iraq. To help her anthropologist husband gather data, Mrs Fernea agreed to dress only in the all-enveloping black veils of the women of the harem. Although she shared a small mud-brick cottage with her husband, her daily life was spent only with the women of the town, for in this polygamous society there existed no social communication between the sexes. The hardships were many but the rewards greater, especially for the readers of this extraordinary narrative: this volume gives a unique insight into a part of Middle Eastern life seldom seen by the West–a life of the women who have no outwardly apparent role in society, but whose thoughts and ideas are now emerging with force and helping to shape modern Middle Eastern society.

I opened the cover to peruse the book, and was hooked by the first sentence: I spent the first two years of my married life in a tribal settlement on the edge of a village in southern Iraq. While the story sounded interesting, I was immediately curious about the woman who wrote this book in the 1950s. Elizabeth Fernea became enmeshed in, and enamored by the Middle East, and wound up spending her life demystifying it for others through teaching, writing and film making.

As for Guests of the Sheik, I found it to be a page turner, filled with fascinating descriptions of the people and community in El Nahara. I kept thinking back to the 1950s; while Elizabeth was living in El Nahra, I was two years old, growing up on Long Island just 20 some miles east of New York City, and my childhood and teenage years would form an experience so completely different from that of the people of this small rural village in southern Iraq.

Reading her book, I was intrigued as a woman, a parent and a wife. I tried to put myself in Elizabeth's place and wonder how I would have reacted. I tried to get a sense of her husband, Bob, and decided she was a far more flexible and forgiving spouse than I might have been. And I tried to see life through the eyes of the women Elizabeth profiles. By the end, I was left thinking about how difficult it can be to have a clear understanding of people who are not like us, and how important it is to spend time with people to garner a better understanding of the complexities of geography, sociology, ethnicity, economics, and all those factors that make one part of the world (indeed, sometimes one part of a country) so different from another part.

For more about Elizabeth Fernea: