Sunday, June 6, 2021

 Sunday, June 6, 2021

             I woke up at 5:30 on my own. I didn’t need my alarm anymore. I spoke to Shivani on my morning walk. We talked about Sidney, her three-year-old son, and politics. We’re on the same page. I spoke about how hard it was for me to make the final draft of The Phonics Discovery System, where I explained the method. She said,” The last 10% is always the hardest to do.”  It’s the scariest. Once that is done, whatever you’re working on goes out into the world.   

            Tommy, my techie, came over. He worked on the audio file and discovered he didn’t have all the stories on his computer. He only had my Uncle the Umpire and the Ugly Man, the story that wasn’t on iTunes. He was ready to load the slides with the audio file. He asked if he could instruct me on how to send him the files from iTunes. Ahhh! “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

Tommy lives a mile away. He hopped on his motorcycle and was at my door in minutes. He found the files and emailed them to himself. 

            I like the Sunday morning NPR shows as much as the Saturday shows. Justine Willis Toms had someone talking about the psychic phenomenon. She talked about using our intuition as well as knowledge from our five senses or someone else’s five senses. she said using our intuition more gives us access to additional sources of knowledge that are not polluted by the limitations of our senses. IF we used it, we would understand people better. Ha! Using our intuition does not free us from our biases. Since our conclusions are not anchored in objective reality, every man’s reality is true—no need to correlate it with anyone else’s.  

            On the subject of seeing people for who they really are, that’s a double-edged sword too. We see the worst of people as well as the best. No one gets to do just be the best they can. We will be judged for our deepest thoughts. 

            I think the speaker assumes that all intuition is pure and comes from God. Oh, boy. Even if it does come from God- well, let’s say that is true, the message still has to pass through the polluted medium of the human mind. There is no one solution. I say all this as someone who is considered to have psychic perception. I treat my perceptions with care. I have to be respectful of the perception of others. My perceptions don’t trump someone else’s because they come through psychically. Besides all other forms of perceptions, they have to be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. 

            One of the NPR Sunday shows here in Hawaii is Kanika pila Sunday. They play Hawaiian music for a good part of the afternoon. Hawaiian popular music is a love song to the land, the ocean, the sky, and nature in general. Today I heard one to a plant in Maui called the silver sword.

Tommy called in the late afternoon. He discovered one of the tracks was missing from the Tommy the Tiger story. It had somehow been lost on iTunes, but I had made disks and saved them. Now, I had to find them. I searched my office and found them pretty quickly. When Tommy arrived, I handed him the disks. He reminded me he needed the external CD players as well. We went into my office to search for it. He remembered what the box looked like and spotted it right away. Ah!

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Confusion versus curiosity

            Dahaene writes about the importance of curiosity in learning. He said curiosity is triggered when there is a disparity between what we know and what we want to know, which implies knowing what you don’t already know.(Dehaene, Stanislas, How We Learn, p. 193.) 

            Both confusion and curiosity cause mental spinning. They are just interpreted differently. Confusion is considered unpleasant, curiosity pleasant.  

            Dehaene says curiosity is dulled by lack of stimulation and dulled by too great a challenge. How do we help students respond with curiosity rather the confusion?