Category: Children

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Critical thinking

Yesterday, our daughter invited my wife and me to visit her after-school robotics club. I was quite impressed by how her teacher handled the problems that the students encountered while working on their codes and mechanical designs. When they reported a problem, he would ask a variation of this question: “What element do you think needs to be changed?” I think this question is incredibly powerful, because it simultaneously encourages the students to do two things: to critically analyze the current state of the project and to identify the next specific step in the solution.

For example, my daughter was writing a code for her Lego EV3-based robot to undergo a mission consisting of driving to a specific spot on the table while avoiding the specified boundaries, performing a 720-degree turn while keeping one wheel inside the target spot and returning back to the starting area. She had trouble with returning back to the base, but with the above prompt from the teacher was able to identify the problematic lite in her code – the robot was turning a bit too much during one of the turns on the way back – and to fix it. Another student was having an issue with the design of his robot – it was getting stuck on its way to the target spot. The same question helped him to realize that the wheels were catching on the base, and the solution was quickly found.

I would certainly like to borrow this question for my own use – in the interactions with my students in the courses I teach and in the lab, with my daughter (helping her to solve the problem at hand without offering a ready-made solution) and directed to myself as a means of teasing out a constructive way forward in whatever I do without being overly critical for the apparent failure of the current state of affairs (the question asks to think about one specific aspect to be changed, not the worthiness of the entire project).

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Handmade gifts

I’ve been thinking about how much we value things made for us by someone special. Two of such things are on top of the mind for me personally (probably because they are sitting on my desk right in front of me).

One is a small leather wallet made by a long-time friend, who is a wife of my shodo (Japanese calligraphy) teacher. She has always amazed me with her curiosity in learning various crafts and ability to execute them at a very high level and with tremendous attention to detail. There is also a 5 yen (go-en) coin that she put inside the wallet as a symbol of friendship, and which I always keep there.

Another special thing is a wooden caster for my coffee mug. It was made by my daughter about a year ago. She used a wood-burner to engrave a cute coded love message for me, which always makes me smile. Later, I tried to reciprocate in kind and made a desk decoration for my daughter with some of the things that were on my mind – symbols of ancient Greek cardinal virtues. Curiously, the word “cardinal” is derived from the Greek “cardo” – meaning “heart” or “hinge”. I particularly like a poetic interpretation that the practice of the cardinal virtues is the hinge on which hangs the door to the good life.

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On gaming

During the past Holiday season, motivated by helping my daughter to set up her new virtual reality (VR) headset, I’ve noticed my own renewed interest in computer games, and I must say that I am quite happy about it. In the past, I’d been fascinated both by the gaming technology and the deep storytelling aspects of some of the best games. However, gradually, I came to see gaming as such a profound waste of time that I somehow managed to convince myself that I didn’t enjoy it anymore.

Well, I am happy to report that this is not true. In fact, I think I can quite easily rationalize that gaming (in moderation, of course, etc., etc.) is good for you, or at least for me. Seriously though, I do believe that it healthy to have something in your life that you do in small amounts and without expecting any recognition for your efforts. This idea reminds me of the book I read last year called “The Little Book of Ikigai” by Ken Mogi. Whether it could be called ikigai in the lofty sense of the word, like something that gives a meaning to life, or not, but solving puzzles is a fundamentally fascinating activity, and it is even more so in VR!

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Self-determination theory in action

I’ve just finished listening to a good audiobook called “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li. Since I’ve started keeping track of what I read/listen to in a series of annual blog posts, I developed a personal criterion for the quality of the book based on whether it makes me want to read more on some of the topics it covers. in that sense, “Indistractible” is good because it pointed me towards several rabbit holes to explore. One of them is the self-determination theory (SDT) in psychology. It argues that for achieving optimal performance, in addition to (indeed, more than) the carrot-and-stick of external motivation, people need emotional nourishment in the form of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to agency – the ability to make independent decisions and take responsibility for their consequences.

Competence is the opportunity to become better at the activity.

Relatedness is the social aspect of the activity – it is the sense of appreciation of your achievement by other people.

My daughter told a story the other day that perfectly illustrated the SDT concept. She entered middle school this year, and they were having a get-together with other students during a recess, where everyone shared a talent they had. My daughter showed a combo of hip-hop moves that she’d been working on in a dance class outside of school. She was delighted that it was met with enthusiasm, particularly by older students. Clearly, she was quite happy about her hip-hop endeavours and was keen to keep exploring it further – thinking about getting together with other interested kids to learn new break-dance moves. It was just what SDT requited: she had autonomy (hip-hop was her activity of choice), competence (several years of practice) and relatedness (the other kids like this stuff and want to learn it).

I thought that perhaps by being conscious about the daily emotional diet, where autonomy, competence and relatedness of the mundane activities play a role of macro-nutrients, we could deliberately manufacture positive experiences like that, rather that occasionally stumbling upon them.

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Sense of taste

I had a funny conversation with my 10-years-old daughter the other day. It turned to the COVID situation, as it does these days, more often than we’d like. I wondered if she understood what “self-monitoring for symptoms” actually meant.

“Watching out for cough, sneezing, sore throat, losing the sense of taste,” she said.

“What is that last one?” I asked.

“Well, you could start wearing mismatched socks, or dresses over gym pants – that sort of thing.”

She turned away to hide a smile.
That’s when you know that your leg is being pulled.

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Acknowledging the difficulties

I often joke to my students that little children teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. Of course, parenting teaches many other useful things too, mostly, I find, in terms of communication skills. One particularly useful observation is neatly summarized by Gretchen Rubin in her inspiring book “The Happiness Project”. She makes a point that children are looking for acknowledgement of their frustrations and negative emotions more often than for actual help with the task or the situation that causes them. Following up the validation of the reality of the negative emotion and the subjective difficulty of the situation with a constructive suggestion is, of course, the best practice. For example, if a child is upset, because she cannot put on socks by herself, saying to her something like: “Putting on socks can certainly be tricky; why don’t you try pulling on the heal instead of the top” would be more helpful than dismissing the child’s frustration with “Come on, this is just putting on a sock! How hard can it be?”

What is even more interesting is that acknowledging the difficulty of a problem even makes adults more likely to persevere with it, rather than abandoning it in frustration. Probably, the prospective of feeling a certain pride for completing something challenging serves as a reward for sticking with the task. It’s another Jedi mind trick to play on the students (or on myself), I suppose.

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What’s in a name?

My ten-years-old daughter is a continuous source of cheerfulness in our lives. If earlier it was mostly due to her inherent childish cuteness and positivity, now that she is becoming more mature, her humour and personality start to come through more and more often. I sometimes feel preemptively nostalgic about these moments, because I know that this stage of her childhood is fleeting. Some of the jokes she makes are just too hilarious not to record. I know that they would make me laugh even years from now.

Here is a conversation that we had in the car the other day, on our way from school. A song by Andy Grammer was playing on the radio, and his name was displayed on the dashboard monitor.

“Andy Grammer,” my daughter said, “he must be a really good writer, with a last name like that.”
“Why?” I asked, to play along.
“He is probably very good at grammar.”
“But ‘grammar’ has ‘-ar’ at the end, not ‘-er’.”
“Well, his name is not ‘Speller’, is it?”
“…”

I have to admit, it’s hard to argue with this logic.

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Things that went well

Exactly a year ago, as the first COVID wave swept through Canada, our university switched to an online teaching mode, which is still in affect. Our daughter’s school also went to remote teaching after coming back from the spring break. Summer travel plans went up in smoke and regular activities like camps were canceled. So we scrambled to find other things to do to keep active and sane during the lockdown: paddle boarding, biking, painting, playing music and taking the dog on long walks. We also decided to vlog about the things we did, as a way of keeping a diary that we might enjoy re-visiting in the future.

As it is the case with most activities, it is far from trivial to maintain the motivation and discipline to vlog regularly. But even if we failed to bring many video projects to completion, the mere exercise of looking at what we did trough the camera lens gave us a better perspective and appreciation for the things we were still capable of doing, despite the pandemic.

One thing that went well is that because of staying at home last summer, I had an opportunity to resurrect my old hobby of building plastic models. A few days ago, I looked through the video footage my daughter and I shot last July, when we started building our first Gunpla kit (she’s grown up so much since then!). Here is the glimpse into those days (better late than never!)

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Practice strategies for adults

One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.

Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults  too, but beyond a certain level of  physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.

If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.

So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.

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Snow days

It is easy to distort reality with the stories we tell ourselves and the memories we form by doing so. For example, I’ve been living in Victoria sufficiently long to somehow assume that winter almost never comes here. “Six months of spring, six months of autumn,” is how I like to describe local wether to friends who don’t live here. When we went on sabbatical in 2017, we missed a heavy snowfall, and thought that it was our unique chance to see snow around our house in years. But as we were heading out to play in the snow this weekend, my nine-years-old daughter happily remarked that so far it snowed in Victoria every year of her life. That is, actually, a fact, and we even have photos to prove it. I thought that it was good to get calibrated in how I view the place I live at and generally, how we spend our lives. Not that mild winters is something to complain about to begin with, but if we look closely, we don’t even have a reason to fret about being deprived of snow days. Those are short lived, but we made most of them this year – sledding at a local hill, having a snowball fight with Bruno, our dog, and building a fortress in the front yard. Now, it looks like it will all melt away just in time for the start of school tomorrow.