Communication Connections

Communication Connections

Growing up, family dinners at our house were loud. Our crowded table overflowed with stories, arguments, and laughter. We never stopped talking. We were great communicators.

In Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, Roberta Michnick Golenkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek detail key skills necessary for success in today’s society. The first of these is collaboration, the action of working jointly to produce or create; the second is communication, developing a connection between speaker and listener for understanding. 

A screaming infant communicates with “raw emotion.” As babies grow, they develop more effective communication skills — pointing and grunting, smiling and wiggling. Toddlers operate at the “show and tell” level — they tell and you listen. Children eventually learn the back and forth of conversation. They contribute to family discussions and listen when others speak.

Children develop communication skills when they are included in family conversations, when their opinions are valued, and when they are taught to consider the perspectives of other people. “What would you do if you were in that situation? How would you feel if this happened to you? Why do you think he/she said that?” 

As children mature, they develop more sophisticated communication skills, contributing to joint stories, role-playing, and tailoring a message to an audience. Children learn the ebb and flow of conversing. They connect on a deeper level — looking into their listeners’ eyes, interpreting body language and facial expressions, and asking clarifying questions. Parents encourage interactive conversations when they ask open-ended questions, give children time to respond, and really listen. What a beautiful gift from parent to child — undivided attention.

Today, we have more means of communication than ever before — radio, television, social media platforms, and smartphones. Waves of words wash over us daily. Families are more likely to text or “chat” than sit at the dinner table to converse. Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) wrote, “The  more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” We have many ways to talk. Is anyone listening? Are we connecting? There is no message if there is no understanding. 

Golenkoff and Hirsh-Pasek write that “Effective communication is the fuel that propels collaboration.” Without effective communication skills, people cannot work together toward a common goal. To become successful in school and in life, children must learn to communicate with the goal of mutual understanding. Parents and teachers who engage children in meaningful conversations and involve them in collaborative projects add fuel which promotes understanding. 

My siblings still recall conversations from many years ago. We share stories, argue, and laugh even though we don’t share the same dinner table anymore. One word, spoken in person, on the phone, or sent in a text, can bring tears or giggles. We understand one another. We connect. We developed our communication skills at the family dinner table. Where are your children developing theirs? Share conversations today with your family that will be remembered for years to come. Tears and giggles will follow. Success in life will too. 

(This is the third 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.)

Just the Facts

Just the Facts

In my spare time, I read grammar books. One of my favorites is The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White. William Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell University, created a “little book” of grammar rules for his students. E.B. White, an essayist for the New Yorker, was a student of Strunk’s. He expanded the little book into an essential tool for all writers.

My favorite section is “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.” Here the authors explain the proper use of aggravate/irritate, imply/infer, among/between and many more words which writers confuse or misuse. On my most recent reading, two entries stood out: Alternate/Alternative and Fact.

Alternate “means every other one in a series; the second, one of two possibilities … an alternate may stand for ‘a substitute.’ Alternative “connotes a matter of choice that is never present with alternate.” In other words, one may substitute an alternate, but not an alternative. The book clarifies with an example: “As the flooded road left them with no alternative [choice], they took an alternate [substitute] route.” 

Today’s political arena seems to be exploding with “alternative facts” —statements which people choose to believe. According to Strunk and White, the word fact can only be used with “matters of direct verification, not of matters of judgment.” Facts are provable; matters of judgment are not. “Ice cream is cold,” is a fact. “Ice cream is good” is a matter of judgment.

Many people today confuse fact with matters of judgment. They accept statements made by politicians and pundits without question, without verification, and without thought. They agree with statements which support their own position and reject those that don’t. Confirmation bias, “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories,” has overtaken critical research when considering news reports. Sources for news are chosen or rejected based on whether they confirm or inflame our opinions. Agreement trumps facts. 

The Elements of Style is one of E. B. White’s most useful books, but his most famous is Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur, a happy young pig, is told that “they’re fattening you up because they are going to kill you. Turn you into bacon and ham.”  Wilbur, justifiably upset, crashes around his pen squealing “I don’t want to die!” Charlotte, Wilbur’s spider friend, assures him that he will not die because she is going to save him.

Charlotte’s plan is to weave words into her web which will convince the farmer to spare Wilbur’s life. She does this, proclaiming him “Some pig,” “Terrific,” and “Radiant.” Finding these words on the web, the amazed farmers believe that Wilbur is exceptional. None consider the spider who wove the words, the spider who says, “Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.” 

Don’t believe everything you read, hear or tweet. Consider the “pig” in question. Not every pig is terrific. Not every statement is true. Don’t be confused or misused by the shouting of politicians, pundits or the press. Do some research. Don’t believe something just because you want it to be true. Verify your facts. Read beyond the headlines. Look behind the web. 

(Websites for checking information include: factcheck.org; politifact.com: snopes.com; and truthorfiction.com. 

Collaboration

Collaboration

My granddaughter loves to play board games. One of her favorites is Hoot Owl Hoot! produced by Peaceable Kingdom. To win this game, players work together to get owlets safely into their nest before the sun rises. Players collaborate instead of compete. 

In Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, Roberta Michnick Golenkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek detail key skills necessary for success in today’s workforce. The first of these is collaboration, the action of working jointly to produce or create, or working together to “build community and mutual respect.” To be successful in today's world, children must learn to work together to achieve a common goal.

Developing collaborative skills takes time. A baby’s world is firmly centered in self. A baby screaming in the middle of the night is not worrying about Mom and Dad getting enough sleep. They want what they want now! As they grow, babies learn, through interaction with their parents and others, to look beyond their own needs. Parents encourage children to express their feelings in quieter ways and to wait for their needs to be met. 

Toddlers gradually learn to share possessions and conversations but they can’t yet interpret or value alternate points of view. My toy is MY toy. Why should I share? With gentle guidance from their parents most begin to respect others’ needs and purposes. Arguing with siblings helps too. Shouts and tears eventually lead to compromise and collaboration.

Back-and-forth interactions — building sand castles with friends, helping with chores, and sharing toys with siblings help children develop interactive skills. Parents can ask children for their ideas and opinions and introduce them to new situations and people. Children grow from “How can I get my way” to “How can I help you?”

As they grow, children develop greater collaborative skills. In school, they team for projects and learning activities. Teachers encourage students to share books, art materials, and ideas. Friends create imaginary worlds in which they share trials and triumphs. One child drives the bus and the other becomes his passenger — then they switch roles. Common goals are set and discussed. Solutions are communal. 

Golenkoff and Hirsh-Pasek write that “Working together really builds understanding.” When children collaborate, they learn more — about the world, their studies, their friends, and themselves. They walk arm-in-arm, brain-with-brain, forward to success. 

When playing a Hoot Owl Hoot!, or collaborating on any project, children work together to reach a goal. The opponent is not the other players but a common problem — getting the owls safely to bed before the sun rises, building the best sand castle ever, learning to read, creating a supportive community, and becoming successful in today’s challenging world. Working together, they all win. 

(This is the second 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.)

Reality is Personal

Reality is Personal

My little friend Jack is a world traveler — well, his parents travel and he tags along.  When he returned from a trip to South Africa, we asked him what Africa was like. Two and a half-year-old Jack answered, “Well, it’s a lot like a house.” 

Jack’s perspective might be a bit small. South Africa is many things. An adult traveler might mention safari parks, native peoples, and penguins on the beach, but to Jack, who lives in an apartment most of the year, Africa is a house. Perspective shapes our reality.

Journalist Brooke Gladstone, in The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on the Moral Panic of Our Time, writes that America is a place of shifting realities. Each person views the world through a “prism” which shapes their reality. That is, each person looks at the world, and the facts presented by science, society, or history, to create their own reality. Gladstone defines reality as “what forms after we filter, arrange and prioritize … facts and marinate them in our values and traditions.” For every person on earth, “Reality is personal.”

Reality slides, shifts, and tumbles from person to person, family to family, city to suburb, farm to factory. Every member of a single family will perceive reality from a different place. A parent views reality from a position of responsibility. A child sees reality from a position of play. Dad runs around turning off lights (thinking about the electric bill) while Tommy runs the TV, computer, microwave, and stereo at the same time. The eldest sibling sees the world differently from the youngest. “How does he get away with so much? Mom and Dad never let me do any of those things!”

If realities can be so different within one family, think about the variety of realities that exist in a classroom, a church, a city, a state, and a nation. Politicians and the media present us with “facts,” which each of us sifts through our beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and biases, sort into categories, and stamp as true or false. My reality, that which I perceive as true to my circumstances and convictions, may never match yours — in fact, it may never even get close.

Problems arise when we don’t acknowledge that these differing realities exist. We stand firm and say, “My way or the highway. My candidate is honest. Yours lies. My interests are important. Yours are trivial. Life is not fair for me but you get all the breaks.” Gladstone suggests that our inability to acknowledge the value of others’ realities prevents us from working together to make a better world.

Without an objective reality, our subjective realities divide us. Gladstone writes that “… we cannot see the real world, whatever that may be. We live in the world that we made from what we see and what we know, and also in the world, we didn’t make and do not see and do not know.” We struggle with differing realities that may never be reconciled. 

Gladstone ends her short book with hope. “We cannot fully enter someone else’s [reality]. But if we really look, we might actually see that other reality reflected in that person’s eyes…” When we listen to others and try to understand the reality in which they live, we come closer together. Instead of clashing, differing realities may sit down, have a meaningful conversation, and work toward mutual understanding. 

Jack’s house may not be all that Africa is, but when we try to understand the realities of another, we can sit down on the porch and enjoy the view together. 

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)

PC

PC

When you hear the letters PC, what comes to mind? Personal Computer? Potato Chips? Pine Cones? Most people connect PC to  “Politically Correct,” which Merriam-Webster defines  as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” Politically correct speech is that which does not offend. 

When first coined, PC had a positive connotation: replace biased or abusive speech with impartial and respectful speech. After some time, political correctness gained a more negative implication — avoid any speech which might offend anyone in any way. Media pundits sneer at it. Employers rate employees on it. Newspapers get sued over it. 

May I suggest another meaning for PC? Polite Conversation. Most of us learned this skill in elementary school. Our teachers guided us through classroom discussions. What if we used the rules we learned at school to speak to one another? 

1. Think before you speak. When you want to speak in school, you must first raise your hand. While waiting for the teacher to call on you, you can take a few seconds to plan your answer. Instead of blurting out the first thought that comes into your head, carefully prepare what you want to say and how you want to say it. 
2. Use your inside voice. A proverb states, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Communication occurs in quiet voices, not shouts. Lovers whisper. Friends chat. More meaning is found in the “still, small voice” than in the howl of the wind or the thunder of the earthquake. Modulate your tone so that your speech welcomes not confronts.
3. Use magic words. Your parents taught you the magic words please and thank you but there are many more: I’m sorry. I’m listening. I care. How can I help? What do you need? Take your time. Explain it to me. I want to understand. I value your opinion. Thanks for sharing.
4. Listen. We often are so anxious to express our opinions that we don’t take the time to hear what another is saying. Before forming your answer or planning your next comment, ruminate for a minute on what you have just heard. Ask the speaker to repeat key points. Ask for explanations and supporting statements.  
5. Employ the “golden rule.” Treat others the way you want to be treated. Do you like to be called names? Do you want others to step on your opinions before you express them? Do you want people to assume things about you without justification? Do you like hearing words that offend, hurt, condescend or attack? Do you want to be labeled or understood? Do you want people to judge your arguments or your associations? Do you want others to see you as an individual with worth or as a flashpoint that must be extinguished? Do you want to be treated with respect? Do so unto others. 

Use what your teachers taught you. Polite conversation fosters other PCs —Peaceful Communication, Personal Connections, and Productive Collaborations. Let your speech and actions reflect your belief that all people have value and are worthy of respect.