#teaching
Good Ways To Introduce The Concept of Consent to Kids
1. “Can I kiss/hug you?” and then respecting the child’s answer is an easy way to let them establish boundaries, understand they have a say in who has access to their body, and show them that you (an adult) respects their answer. You’re a role model, and if they see someone they respect seeking consent, they will learn to seek it themselves.
2. When the child is around pets, and one no longer wants to be held or pet, say something along the lines of “it looks like Fido doesn’t want patted anymore, so we need to stop.” Cats are, surprisingly, great examples of the concept of ongoing consent. If a cat bats at you, or the child, in the middle of being pet, don’t berate the cat or call it mean. Just say “Fluffy asked us to stop, and it’d be mean for us to continue”. Kids easily understand this idea when presented in this context.
3. Work the concept of consent into lessons on sharing. “You want to borrow Sally’s crayons? Let’s ask her permission.” and then to the other child “are you okay with Luke borrowing your crayons?” To establish the idea of communication over just assuming and taking.
4. Encourage the child to ask permission before giving affection; “let’s ask Billy if he wants a hug!”. Never force the child to receive affection; “you must let Auntie give you a kiss”.
5. Teach the child to recognize personal cues and body language by speaking it over with them out loud. If a shy playmate hides behind his mother’s leg, say “it looks like Johnny wants his personal space right now, we can see if he wants to play later”. If a playmate quietly shakes her head when asked to join a game, say “Suzie doesn’t want to play, and that’s okay, let’s ask someone else!”.
6. Teach the child to respect “no”. If the child is roughhousing with a friend or sibling and they say “stop!”, enforce that the child must do a hard stop. If you’re tickling the child and they say “stop!”, immediately stop.
7. Explain the concept of Good Touch vs. Bad Touch. Good Touches make us feel loved and cared for, like hugs or high fives or kisses or cuddling or ruffled hair. Bad Touches make us feel sad or hurt, like punches and hitting and biting or any other touch that makes us feel strange or gross or bad. Explain that we never want to give anyone Bad Touches, and we never have to receive Bad Touches.
8. Respect their personhood and decision making, where you can. Practice letting them make decisions regarding themself and their body. For example, “it’s bedtime, do you want the monkey pajamas or the zebra pajamas?” Or “Dinner time! Do you want the green beans or the broccoli for your vegetable?” By letting them think about what they want for their body, and then respecting that decision, you are teaching them the foundation of consent.
9. Do not use made up or silly names for the child’s genitalia. If a child asks about their genitalia, or expresses curiosity in how theirs works or why it’s different than someone of the opposite sex, this is a massive learning opportunity. Use an anatomy book, or other scientific source, and approach it as scientifically as possible. Explain that their brother or sister or friend’s privates aren’t for us to use for our own curiosity, but that wondering about genitals is okay and you’ll help them find their answers in a way that doesn’t require anyone’s body or privacy to be compromised.
10. Age up the discussion with the child. A teen or even pre-teen can be spoken to on an even deeper level. If a man in a movie keeps persistently kissing a woman even after she says no, ask the older child to identify what he’s doing wrong, and how they should handle a situation like that. If the older child is in high school, talk blatantly about sexual consent and what it looks like. They may blush, eye roll, say “I know this already”, but the more you normalize the discussion the more you make it comfortable for them to have that discussion with a partner when they really need to.
My mother was fantastic at #10. We’d be hanging out watching TV together, listening to music, whatever, and end up having deep discussions about some issue that’d been brought up. Like, she droped truth about how women should be treated every chance she got so my sister and I knew to accept no less.
The education system is a missing focus on Learning, teaching to others and thereby improving overall personality, Teaching compassion, teaching collaboration and not competition( Big things are achieved through Collaborations and not through Competing with each other). Promoting curiosity and observation power in school/college/university and at home.
i think a big thing that disconcerts adults about learning new skills is that learning as an adult means you are very aware of how bad you are at the beginning in a way children aren’t.
i picked up the saxophone when i was 11 and played until i was about 17. by the end of it i was first chair in our highest ensemble, a district honor band player, etc. but at the beginning – and this is important – i was bad. for the first year or so, i had no rhythm, i couldn’t make my tongue line up with my fingers, i was consistently sharp, etc. etc. other kids actually made fun of me for my lack of skill.
but 11 year old me didn’t care. 11 year old me practiced, but she also thought that being able to play the pink panther made her incredible (i shudder in retrospect). i mean, i was aware i wasn’t a master, but my skill level didn’t deter me from wailing out those notes in a way that i’m sure had my band director questioning his career decisions.
right now, i’m trying to pick up the guitar. it’s a very different instrument from the saxophone, and i struggle a lot with things like strumming patterns and barre chords. and sometimes i don’t want to play, because i know i’m bad at guitar. and sometimes i beat myself up when stumbling through a poor acoustic rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World because it’s not how i want it to sound. and it’s made even more frustrating because i can navigate the saxophone so smoothly.
but then i remember that i have to think like a kid. i might not be the best at guitar by any stretch of the imagination, but every little bit of progress is still progress.humility is a big part of learning, but if you treat a practice session like your own private concert, it becomes so much more fun, even if you’re bad like i am. when you’re first picking up a skill, whether it be an instrument, or a language, or a fine art, no one is expecting you to be the yo yo ma of that thing. forget about how little you know about the skill and think instead about how much you have to learn – that’s fun! do your best!!
i find that as you get older, people think that you have less of an excuse to be bad at things, no matter when you started learning them
but after you get good suddenly people start praising you for “being ahead of the curve”
the instant you can start divesting yourself from this horrid world of expectation, the easier it becomes to try any new thing
Guys this is so important!! Give yourselves some slack and just keep on trucking! Just focus on yourself and be proud of what you have achieved so far. Even if what you achieved is a little thing, little pieces pile up eventually to something big! You’re doing great, keep it up :D
How to Use the Feynman Technique to Identify Pseudoscience
Earlier this year, a study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.
This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics?
In a lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1966, the influential theoretical physicist told a story about the difference between knowing the name for something and truly understanding it:
“This boy said to me, ‘See that bird standing on the stump there? What’s the name of it?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got the slightest idea.’ He said, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you much about science.’
I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn’t tell me anything about the bird. He taught me ‘See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird — you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,’ and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.
The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody’s name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say, 'the Fitz-Cronin effect,’ and I ask, 'What is the effect?’ and I can’t remember the name.
There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog — a windable toy dog — and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says, 'What makes it move?’ Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, 'What makes it move?’ Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, 'What makes it move?’ and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about — physics, biology, chemistry — but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: The answer I was trying to learn is that 'energy makes it move.’
Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea — it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that 'God makes it move,’ or, 'Spirit makes it move,’ or, 'Movability makes it move.’ (In fact, one could equally well say, 'Energy makes it stop.’)
Look at it this way: That’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference. It’s the same with this inertia proposition.
Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.
What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, 'I don’t think energy makes it move.’ Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.’ You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson, is that not possibly destructive?
I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others: 'gravity makes it fall;’ 'the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction.’ Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it’s not science.”
Feynman’s parable about the meaning of science is a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something, but it is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess. If the person in question is communicating ostensibly to a non-specialist audience using specialist terms out of context, the first question on our lips should be: “Why?” In the words of Feyman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”
Source:BigThink|
Video:Richard Feynman on What It Means | Blank On Blank @pbsdigitalstudios
Konatsu 2 years and a half old eat an orange. Despite that her parents are both Japanese citizens they decided to speak and teach her English before their mother tongue. The understanding of her Japanese is very limited for now and the kid expressed herself only in English. The parents are wondering if they will be able to keep English at home when Konatsu will start elementary school. Moriya city, ibaraki prefecture, Japan
Photo : Pierre-Emmanuel Delétrée
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