Three years ago I read and reviewed Lu Hanessian's Let the Baby Drive, and recently my thoughts have been returning to that insightful book. Today's Frazz brought it again to mind.
Hanessian's son began talking when he was 10 months old; combined with her habit of careful observation and her incessant efforts to understand him, this revealed amazingly sophisticated thought processes behind seemingly random or rebellious behavior. Banging a spoon on his high chair tray, as infants do, he proclaimed, "Mah-mee! I'm chopping wood!" When he was three years old he went through a frightening phase of what to all appearances was open rebellion, but which she was able to trace to his terror that he might lose her, as he had "lost" his daddy during a two-week business trip, and as the water goes down the drain and never returns. When she dealt with his fear, the misbehavior took care of itself.
When we began homeschooling, I tried to insist that Janet show her work when doing math problems, as I had done as a math tutor and college math Teaching Assistant. If the teacher can't see how you got the wrong answer, what can he do but mark it wrong? How can he understand where your thinking veered off course and steer you in the right direction? However, my effort to elicit from Janet the thought processes behind her answers merely resulted in extreme frustration for us both. Because I was a homeschooling mother and not a classroom teacher with 30 children to deal with, I was able to discover that, like Caulfield above, she knew all the answers, but could not express how she got them. They were just there. Much later she did develop the ability to follow her own thought processes and explain them in proper mathematical logic; in the meantime, by not being forced to learn by rote the educationally-accepted methods of doing math, she developed her own advanced ways of mathematical thinking, which served her well through her college math degree and beyond.
The connection between this and Hanessian's work is the realization that the actions of children, whether babies or students, have meaning and logic, if we will only take the time and effort to understand. I've been relearning that lesson, particularly as I observe two-year-old Noah.
