Top Ten Concepts

A few days back I wrote down a list of my ten favorite words. Since then, I've been ruminating upon other things I like, concepts, that didn't make the word list because they aren't fun to say. Just fun to talk about. And while I procrastinate on the following things, I thought I'd write about them. What am I procrastinating about?

1. Getting someone besides Mike to read what I've written thus far (that's also sort of a, hey, if you want to give me several hours of your life you will never get back...)

2. Figuring out what to do with my part three. If there even needs to be one. I like things in odd numbers, though.

3. Doing some planning work for the J-O-B.

4. Knitting.

5. Cleaning house and folding a dozen loads of laundry.

6. Other "quotidian" things that are far too dull to mention.

7. Working on some Benedictine stuff that is far harder to write than fiction.

8. shortening a blue polyester pleated skirt for Irish Dance.

9. Planning girl scout stuff.

So here I am. Ten favorite concepts. I think I have ten. There's no real rhyme or reason here. Most are from my training as a teacher.

10. TPWSGWTAU. I love this because it demonstrates how little we really know about learning and about the human brain. TPWSGWTAU is "The place where sentences go when they are understood." I kid you not. Strings of letters are decoded as words, words are stored briefly in short-term memory until enough words are stored to create a sentence, and then, well, the sentence goes to TPWSGWTAU.

9. Scaffold-building. I don't mean like when Jeff came up to St. Louis and built scaffolding all around my house to replace my roof. I mean it in a teaching sense, again. It's the effect a teacher has on a student such that a student performs better with the teacher there. The idea that teachers are important. When it's done right, the student doesn't even realize it happened. You set up a framework that guarantees success. Then, you slowly repeat it, taking a bit of the framework away. Show, watch, leave alone. Right? Except, it's more than that. It allows a child or a learner to see that they can do it, and it builds confidence along with skill, and none of that confidence is hollow or fake. They really solved that polynomial equation. And now they can do it again. The better you know your student, the better scaffolding you can build. My favorite tutoring student could soar at my table--and then, pass algebra II in school--because I knew what scaffolding she needed.

8. The Hawthorne Effect. If you tell someone you're watching them to see how they'll do, they do better. If you worsen conditions but tell them you've improved them, they will work harder to prove that better conditions improve work habits. Even though they're really worse. Which, as an aside, is probably why No Child Left Behind was thought to be a good idea. Keep testing, and kids will get smarter! Well, unfortunately, the Hawthorne Effect is a temporary state.

7. Subculture. Obvious. But the more subcultures I brush up against, the more I like them. Mary's dad belongs to this little subculture of people who build 1/12 scale steam engine trains and run them on little tracks. And her family takes it a step further and serves a 5 course dinner on little train cars once a year. The Dinner Train. Subculture. The SCA. Subculture. 365 bloggers. Subculture of a subculture. Intentional communities. Texans. Irish Dancers. Mah jongg tournaments. Number station collectors. Montessori teachers. Vegans. Peace activists. Benedictines. Harley riders. British sports car enthusiasts. Knitters. Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Subcultures.

6. Synchronicity. The idea that things happen for a reason--that two or more related events have occurred independently but in a meaningful way. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there is far more going on around us than our brains allow us to focus on. When we focus on one thing, other things that are similar seem to connect. Or perhaps there's a larger force at work. Ironically, although these things happen to me all the time, I can't think of a single example at the moment.

5. Math. Specifically, that mathematicians are the scientist most likely to believe in God. Astronomers are the least likely. Or so I've been told. Astronomers look out into the skies and see vast expanses of...nothing. Mathematicians, all they see are the patterns that connect everything together. I also like the idea that biology is applied chemistry; chemistry is applied physics; physics is applied mathematics.

4. Subclinical. When someone is subclinical, they do not have enough test results or symptoms to be fully diagnosed with something. But they might have it anyway. I have a neighbor who is currently subclinically several things, and doctors pretty much don't know what's going on. But something is. I find this fascinating because there is, again, so much we do not understand. I am subclinically hypothyroid, to take another example, although my doctor is wise enough to call a duck a duck. Where I'm truly "subclinical" also involves the philosophical question of where is the line between "personality trait" and "symptom." I have some temporal lobe issues--four specific ones. And a family history. A neurologist who was puzzled. Inconclusive EEGs. But maybe they're all just coincidences. And maybe Maeve will drive us all to school tomorrow on her trike.

3. Learned Helplessness. The basics: if you give a dog no option but electric shock, whether he sits, stands, barks, shuts up, runs, cries, he will eventually lie down and take it. Even if the door to the shock room is opened and they're FREE TO GO. When this is applied to a classroom of first grade students, oy vey. For whatever reason, LH seems to lead to a lack of pattern recognition. Every addition problem is BRAND NEW. If it isn't identical to the one you just solved, it is a total mystery. There is no way to solve it. Might as well give up now. This was most astonishing when I got to St. Pius, in a classroom filled with kids without LH. It made those with it like creatures from another planet. But by then, I could dig it. See: scaffold building.

2. Hypergraphia. The intense compulsion to write. Once I had a word for it, I felt better about it. It started in 8th grade. I remember--I started writing epic letters to friends in different states who could simply not keep up. So I took on twelve international pen pals. And filled spiral notebook after spiral notebook. As I got older, it waxed and waned, mostly depending on how much official writing I had to do. I find if I knit a lot, I mean a lot, it helps if I'm really compulsive. High school gave me a word processor and more people to write to. College introduced me to listmaking. I have a file on my computer called "list of lists". Seriously. The summer Mike and I dated and I went home to Housotn, I wrote him a letter every day. I mean like 10 pages a day. And of course, discovering blogs helped funnel a lot of this. I (here's some purse-spilling for ya) find that in the winter, if I don't write enough, or do other little things with my hands, like knitting, that I find myself air-typing my thoughts as I fall asleep. It's kind of a problem. But I'm trying to tame it down to "personality trait." With fair-to-middlin' success. I've also gotten a lot better at the output, not in amounts, but in quality. Thank God.

1. Wabi Sabi. It's a Japanese concept I'm going to mis-represent. How I understand it is that well-made beautiful things do not stop being beautiful just because they age and start to fall apart. It's the handmade cereal bowl you use every morning because you love the person who made it. It's the Russian-English dictionary on my shelf with the cover falling off but I don't replace it because it is still useful. It's a house from 1904 with bad windows and creaky floors that isn't artificially gussied up to look like a house from 1996. The wood planes in my dad's workshop that belonged to his father. All the furniture in my house that I like. The stool in my kitchen from a St. Pius V school classroom. Old cemeteries. Original woodwork with dings included. It's not purposefully allowing things to get dirty or bad, it's just accepting that objects age, and can do so gracefully and it does not diminish them. It's all over my life. And, once again, having a name to go along with it makes it seem cozy instead of lazy.

Well then.