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And then so
Apr. 6th, 2010 10:46 pmWell. It's been a while.
I went to America and visited family, which was nice. Harry came too. Will expand this later (with actual thoughts), but that is not the point of this particular entry.
Right now I am back home again. I got off the bus yesterday evening to find a city that seemed made of air, and all of it moving. I pushed and fought and struggled home through it, dragging my suitcase, exhausted and sweaty and kind of needing to pee, and for that half hour hating everything and wondering why I live here. And then I came in and Jen was making salsa and Oli and Nice Daniel were holding some kind of band practice, and I remembered.
Then I went to work today and it was still light when I left at 7, and I felt all full of joy even though it was raining. And I've just had a shower and I even like this flat again, for a little while. It's icy cold in winter (and autumn and spring and I suspect also summer) and full of mice and surrounded by noisy neighbours, but it has the loveliest shower.
And I was thinking, while in that shower, about the heaps of work I need to do for my internship; about how when I got this internship I thought "hey, it's all work on the internet -- that'll be great, I spend loads of time on the internet already so it'll be super-easy!", but it turns out that work on the internet is still work; and have since come to the conclusion that it's an eminently bad idea to have work in the same medium as most of your leisure time, becuase (at least for me) they then get all blurred together and I procrastinate even more.
And then I thought "wait a minute: am I a Montessori kid or what?" -- maybe a cheesy way to put it, but it was all in my head because both my parents and like everybody on my mom's side of the family are Montessori teachers, so having just visited them it was all fresh in my mind -- anyway, the point is: there is no difference between work and play. Montessori intentionally blurs these boundaries, with many of the learning materials being collectively called 'works' and often individually called 'games' or something similar, and having a play-like structure (e.g. early math 'works' include things like 'the stamp game', 'racks and tubes', 'the binomial cube', etc.) It's not all perfect and rosy, of course, but at a basic level, it is pretty hard to train kids into self-directed learning if you can't get them to want to do stuff.
I used to be like that, always wanting to stay inside and play with the science kits or do more square root problems (on the 'pegboard') instead of playing outside where I would be obliged to run around in the uncomfortable heat. Then, somewhere along the way, all these external motivations started coming in. I got praised for my work, and then graded for it, and within a year I was doing it for the grades, and not for its own sake, and I discovered that I am actually a master procrastinator. Now I just have this pile of stuff that I need to get done, but I have managed to create a 'work' box in my head and I can't get it out of it.
I went to America and visited family, which was nice. Harry came too. Will expand this later (with actual thoughts), but that is not the point of this particular entry.
Right now I am back home again. I got off the bus yesterday evening to find a city that seemed made of air, and all of it moving. I pushed and fought and struggled home through it, dragging my suitcase, exhausted and sweaty and kind of needing to pee, and for that half hour hating everything and wondering why I live here. And then I came in and Jen was making salsa and Oli and Nice Daniel were holding some kind of band practice, and I remembered.
Then I went to work today and it was still light when I left at 7, and I felt all full of joy even though it was raining. And I've just had a shower and I even like this flat again, for a little while. It's icy cold in winter (and autumn and spring and I suspect also summer) and full of mice and surrounded by noisy neighbours, but it has the loveliest shower.
And I was thinking, while in that shower, about the heaps of work I need to do for my internship; about how when I got this internship I thought "hey, it's all work on the internet -- that'll be great, I spend loads of time on the internet already so it'll be super-easy!", but it turns out that work on the internet is still work; and have since come to the conclusion that it's an eminently bad idea to have work in the same medium as most of your leisure time, becuase (at least for me) they then get all blurred together and I procrastinate even more.
And then I thought "wait a minute: am I a Montessori kid or what?" -- maybe a cheesy way to put it, but it was all in my head because both my parents and like everybody on my mom's side of the family are Montessori teachers, so having just visited them it was all fresh in my mind -- anyway, the point is: there is no difference between work and play. Montessori intentionally blurs these boundaries, with many of the learning materials being collectively called 'works' and often individually called 'games' or something similar, and having a play-like structure (e.g. early math 'works' include things like 'the stamp game', 'racks and tubes', 'the binomial cube', etc.) It's not all perfect and rosy, of course, but at a basic level, it is pretty hard to train kids into self-directed learning if you can't get them to want to do stuff.
I used to be like that, always wanting to stay inside and play with the science kits or do more square root problems (on the 'pegboard') instead of playing outside where I would be obliged to run around in the uncomfortable heat. Then, somewhere along the way, all these external motivations started coming in. I got praised for my work, and then graded for it, and within a year I was doing it for the grades, and not for its own sake, and I discovered that I am actually a master procrastinator. Now I just have this pile of stuff that I need to get done, but I have managed to create a 'work' box in my head and I can't get it out of it.
