Becoming Brilliant

       

Becoming Brilliant

Kindergarten students are eager. They want to learn. They want to do. With shining eyes and earnest expressions, they dive into learning. Their hands are always waving and their voices and fingers are always active.

Young children love working together, sharing their ideas, learning new things, expressing their opinions, building and breaking things, and expressing joy, sadness, fear or anger. Their feelings are evident on their faces. They live life to the fullest. 

In Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, Roberta Michnick Golenkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek detail six key skills necessary for success in today’s workforce: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity, and confidence. Traditionally, education has focused on retaining content, that is, learning information. Today, children must learn to sort through mountains of information and to prioritize, connect, combine, and use it to solve problems in unique ways.

Successful people must be flexible, personable, and collaborative. Instead of “encyclopedias of facts,” professionals must be “information sifters,” accessing information to solve problems. Golenkodff and Hirsh-Pasek write that kindergarten students who come to school “socially-competent and did such things as sharing, cooperating, or helping other kids are more likely to attain higher education and well-paying jobs than those who are less socially-competent.”

One busy day, my kindergarten students were cutting out Winnie-the-Pooh paper dolls. Many pulled at my sleeves asking me to help them cut. Cutting is challenging for many five-year-olds. One little boy worked happily at his table. When I walked over to check on him, I noticed that his excess paper was intact with a perfect Pooh-shaped hole. There was no cut from the edge into the paper. He eagerly explained his unique solution to the cutting challenge. He then shared it with his table-mates helping and encouraging them patiently. 

I have kept that perfect Pooh-shaped paper and remember this student fondly. At age five, he wasn’t yet successful in the ways tests evaluate students. His “brilliance” was in envisioning new solutions, sharing his ideas, and helping his friends.  He came to school knowing how to communicate, collaborate, create, think critically and act with confidence. He was a successful person ready to became a successful student.

Parents and teachers are vital in helping children become brilliant. Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, begin their book by asking “What if… What if we could create a world in which the educational system matched what know about how children learn?” The “What if” world is not filled with flash cards but with children eagerly working together to solve problems. In the traditional school world, some are left behind but in the “What if” world, every student is successful. Which world do you want for your children? 

(This is the first in a series of articles inspired by Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D. I encourage you to read it.)

The Impermanent Past

The Impermanent Past

Time is a strange concept. When we speak of time, we use terms such as past, present, and future. The tenses of our language operate on the same system. I exist. I existed. I will exist. But as we all experience, time is slippery, speeding up or slowing down as we age and experience life. 

Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of Philosophy, Physics, and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, in his essay, “There Is No Now,” argues that there is no “present.” Since we experience the world through our senses, and that sensory input takes time to be perceived, by the time the “present” arrives, it is already in the past. In his words, “We link the past and the future through the conceptual notion of a present, of “now.” But all we have is the accumulated memory of the past — stored in biological or various recording devices — and the expectation of the future.” In other words, what we perceive as the present is merely a link between the past and the future.

Professor Gleiser’s argument is thought-provoking. Without the “present” how are the past and future really placed? We are not seers; we cannot see the future. No one knows what will happen in the next minute, hour, day or year. But we continue to plan and hope for the best.

We think we have a firmer grasp on the past. It’s already happened. We’ve stored it in our “biological or various recording devices” and can look it up. The present is fleeting. The future is unknown. The past is fixed and known — or so we think.

It turns out, that the past is as impermanent as the present. As historians research, we find that the truths we held dear, may not be so true after all. Heroes are knocked from their pedestals. Wars are reviewed from opposing sides. Rights for some are found not to be rights for all. Our collective past is sliced and diced until we hardly recognize it.

Our personal pasts are almost as ephemeral.  How often have you recalled a family event and had a sibling remember it differently? Has an old photo ever surprised you with evidence of things long gone? Have you told a story so often that it has replaced the actuality of the event? We shape our past as we wish we could shape our future. 

The concept of time is elusive: the past is impermanent; the present doesn’t exist; we can’t expect anything of the future. Should we relish the “good old days” and fear the unknown future? Should we bemoan the sorrows of the present and remember the joys of the past? Should we project our fears into the future and forget the comforts of today? How should live in time?

Whether or not we understand it, how we spend time defines us. We spend time being happy or sad. We spend time helping others or grabbing all we can for ourselves. We spend time stepping forward with purpose or hiding in fear. We can spend time wishing away the past, hating the present, and dreading the future, or we can spend time shaping our lives the way we want them to be. We can shape time to serve our purposes and we can shape our purposes to serve the world. 

There may be not a present, the past may be gone, and the future may not work out according to plan, but the time we have is precious. Use it wisely. I laugh. I laughed, I will laugh. I love. l loved. I will love. I help. I helped. I will help. Let the tenses we live create time worth living.  

(Quotation from “The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning by Marcelo Gleiser, Basic Books, 2014)