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Sometimes I am a teacher, and although most of my teaching has been imposed on adults, I have also taught in high school. So it seems to me that I would do well to write about children and collect from a teacher’s point of view. I have no children of my own, and I’m not entirely sure this is a disadvantage. I think I have a more global vision of the subject. For example, are you the parent of a budding collector who has brought home all the insect repellants you could find and left them loose in the house?
Or are you -like me- an uncle who has things and ideas to share with a nephew or niece -and
my sisters can handle the dispute. Or are you a parent who has a beloved X collection and hopes to share your love of the subject with your children? In fact, is your child young enough to feel your excitement and joy, or has he reached the age where, when collecting X, he is “like … totally tired – for sure – I mean, like. .. ..that gay. “(There are no opinions on ‘gay’, but I learned from one of my nieces that ‘gay’ is not necessarily an insult, but rather refers to something well outside of the speaker’s universe. era, or perhaps a little earlier, I would have used the word ‘square’).
Here I blatantly plagiarize my own damn self. (See below for a link to the entire article.)
We teachers do all kinds of things to get our students motivated / ready / willing / awake, etc. learn. Collecting is a wonderful and painless way to do this.
Consider, for example, stamp collecting and geography. A child who has somehow received a Timbuktu stamp has only to wonder where Timbuktu is. If there is a gazetteer and / or a large map of the world somewhere in the house, the education HAS to follow. A little warning though, there is a fine line between helping a child learn and irritating the little one beyond tolerance. You don’t need to be an expert on a certain subject or collectible to teach your kids. Let them follow their own interests.
So how do you use collection to arouse curiosity and avoid making what follows a battle of wills to get the child to do the cleaning every day and move on for the long haul? And, maybe, just maybe, carry a whim from childhood to adulthood. (F’rinstance, a guy named Greg Martin had a thing for guns when he was young and turned it into a wonderful and successful business called Greg Martin Auctions [http://www.gregmartinauctions.com/gma/index.asp].)
Well, you start at the end. You wonder where you want the child to end up. In educational jargon, this is called TSWBAT (pronounced twîz bat) and lists what the student will be able to … This is not a bad idea. Starting at the end is the foundation of most planning efforts, but the value here has to do with opening your thinking. For example, it would be nice to take the stamp collecting example above and have the goal of “teaching geography.” But you’d better say to yourself: “Little Johnny will get a stamp and envelope that has been mailed from each of the 50 states and he
he’ll be able to find all 50 on the map at the start of school next fall. ”(Have you seen The Tonight Show when Jay Leno walks around like a Jay and asks people on the sidewalk where Europe is and someone guesses it’s the capital of Canada?? I am a little embarrassed to admit that I am a teacher.)
Now when they tried to teach me these planning things in various b’ness classes that I had to take, I think I remember that only after defining where we want to be when we are there do we start planning the necessary steps to get there. . It seems reasonable. What is perhaps a bit unreasonable, however, is the amount of “with-all” that a child insists he needs to get the job done. But then again, maybe not. Remember, he thought, childhood is about trying a lot of things and putting some – or perhaps most of it – aside in favor of what will become your passions.
