Love, Live, and Teach

My job as a parent has three parts: to love, to provide, and to teach.

To love is the most important. It drives everything else. It provides the fuel for me to work and for Shane to grow. God loved us first, so we love. Shane needs to know he is lovable and loved. Then he needs to know how to express love himself. 

The necessities follow: shelter, water, food...whatever is needed for survival. Parents provide what is necessary or find help to get it if they cannot. Love counts a necessity, too. If you don't agree, look up language deprivation experiments or ask a psychology professor about studies with affection withheld from children. When tangible and intangible survival needs are met a child is ready to learn. The better and more consistently they are met, the more learning will be accomplished. 

The last goal for a parent is to teach. To live is to learn. Parents need to teach observation, communication, reason, self-discipline/behavior, and empathy first and skills second. The skills 'required' vary greatly by individual, culture, and even location. The better a child can focus themselves and communicate to observe, reason, and relate the better they will learn any skill. The more they learn, the more they will increase their ability to learn. 

There are three general phases to learning anything.

Exposure

Experiments

Reflection

Exposure is the simplest. It's the introduction of new ideas and things. Sometimes it's enough on it's own. A new idea could bridge a gap, answer a question, provide a tool, or power curiosity. A new thing can lead to a new idea.

Experiments are what follow: the bread and butter of learning. Practice! Take chances! Make mistakes! See what happens!

Reflection occurs after exposure and experimentation. It is the engine that refines learning and powers future experiments. What went right? What went wrong? Why? What can I change? I can ask questions and provide framework to promote reflection until Shane internalizes it and learns to reflect more and more effectively on his own.

As a teacher, I think about learning frequently. I cannot learn for my students, so what can I do? I can lay out concepts or steps to make a skill attainable. I can ask questions, provide feedback, build structure, and help motivate.

I cannot make a student experiment or reflect, but I can always expose them to a new idea.

I like to imagine each new idea stretches the brain out a little. It adds a wrinkle. It's akin to exercise for a muscle. Each repetition has an effect even if the effect isn't clear as it happens There may or there may never be an 'ah-ha!' moment after learning a single thing, but the cumulative effect of a life of learning is very clear. As is the opposite.

Here's where I make a nerdy reference, so that whoever reads this knows I wrote it. 

In Tolkien's works, a lot of magic was subtle. The elves were magic, but most of what they did didn't seem magical. To top it off, anyone who hung around the elves long enough tended to grow and feel/look lighter just be association. I want to be like that for my son (though I'm normally more of a dwarf guy). I want to ask questions, make him think, be there and shine a light.

PS - In Freakanomics, when there's also a line in the chapter about baby names and their effects that says something like "your child is more likely to do x or y because of who you are." This isn't a research paper, so I'm not going to take the time to look either up (outside of the little I already did). I always want to keep learning, because I feel like you're never more alive when you learn and I want to better myself for my family's sake.