Each little experience, every idea, is helping your child build his internal model of the universe.—Sandra Dodd
Peace,
Beth in MA
Real learning looks like doing a billion piece jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes you'll work on a dragon down in the corner. Sometimes you'll work on a cat in the center. Sometimes you'll work on the bits that are red. Sometimes you'll work on the frame. Eventually you'll discover what connects the dragon and the cat. You'll work on whatever interests you. And eventually there will be a rich collection of individual bits that form a bigger picture. But since it's a billion pieces you'll never do the whole thing. You'll just do the parts that fascinate you.
Where that analogy breaks down is that all the connections are already there in a jigsaw puzzle for you to discover. In real life, there are connections that are obvious—all dogs have certain characteristics that makes them dogs for instance—but the important connections are the ones no one ever has seen before. Like how a love is better than a summer day :-) Or how time is space and space is time. And the beauty is that you don't need to know all the obvious connections first. Sometimes the obvious connections get in the way, cause you to think inside the box. Innovative thinking is not confining ideas to how they're "supposed" to be connected, or what box they're "supposed" to be in.
Picture learning like piecing together a massive jigsaw puzzle. With natural learning kids plunge into the puzzle wherever it seems interesting to them. They fit the pieces together here and there working all over the puzzle. They won't go in any particular order. They'll stick with one spot or jump about depending on what's most interesting to them. They'll stumble over new and interesting things. They'll see old things in unfamiliar places giving the unfamiliar places a sense of familiarity as well as intrigue.
Webs, nets, connections
The terms "web" and "net" have both been commandeered by the internet. The idea of a grid or web or matrix to represent the connections involved in learning and memory is a good one, though—of many "dots" connected in all directions.  The photo here is of the two-dimensional web—very flat—of a garden spider, outside my house this week. Black widow spiders make a web that's three-dimensional, but has no pattern. We have those in our yard, too. The webs on which our own mental models of the universe are based are more complex—with past and future, emotion and theory, alternative stories and secondary theories. We have sounds and songs, scents and tastes to remember, and can sort things by temperature or texture, in our minds and imaginations. Rejoice in the random!
photo by Sandra Dodd |
Each child builds his own model of the universe.
School tries to insert one but it can't. It just can't be done. Either the child takes the school parts and builds his (I did) or he rejects those parts because he can't find a place to fit them, or because he just hates them and resents their delivery, and that's called "forgetting."
The trivia page has several mentions of an internal model of the universe.
Enough trivia will create a detailed model of the universe.