Let me tell you a story about a conversation I don’t remember. It was recounted to me years later by a family friend, an old college-mate of my parents.
When I was three, this friend was visiting our house and got talking to me.
“Are you able to count?” she asked. (She’s an economist. They consider such things important.)
I nodded.
“How high can you count?”
“Twenty-seven!” I said proudly.
So I counted to twenty-seven for her. Then she prompted me to think about what might come next. I guessed … “twenty-eight?” And after that … “twenty-nine?”
I wasn’t sure where to go from there, but she told me thirty, and then we counted thirty-one, thirty-two, and so on, together. I don’t know how far we went – maybe fifty.
“There!” the friend said, pleased with herself for having coaxed open the tender blossom of my young mind. “Now how high can you count?”
I paused.
Grinned.
“Twenty-seven!”
Now then, how zen!
I love what this story says about teaching and learning – and how Coaxing Open the Tender Blossoms of Young Minds just isn’t the straightforward process you might believe (if you’d never spent much time in the company of three-year-olds, at least).
Learning happens in its own time.
Ability to parrot is not evidence that learning has happened.
Learning belongs to the learner.
But why twenty-seven?
What was significant about that number?
Was I a mathematical prodigy who had just cubed my own age and decided to stop there for a while?
Really not.
Was it a completely meaningless boundary that I had set for no reason?
Maybe. But…
What occurred to the family friend at the time of our conversation was that my father was twenty-seven. (That’s how I can be sure that I was three. Our birthdays are ten days apart.*)
* All right, clever-clogs, so I’m approximately 97.26% sure that I was three. Happy now?
She speculated that I’d recently learned my father’s age, and just couldn’t conceive of knowing a number that was even more mindbogglingly vast than that.
[Sort of like Saki’s Clovis, in “The Match-Maker”:
“The crisis came,” returned Clovis, “when she suddenly started the theory that late hours were bad for one, and wanted me to be in by one o’clock every night. Imagine that sort of thing for me, who was eighteen on my last birthday.”
“On your last two birthdays, to be mathematically exact.”
“Oh, well, that’s not my fault. I’m not going to arrive at nineteen as long as my mother remains at thirty-seven. One must have some regard for appearances.”]
Oddly enough, this sounded plausible
I think it’s about reach.
I was comfortable knowing how to count up to twenty-seven. Probably, the tremendous antiquity of my father helped to make it a particularly good number to hang on to. I needed to rest there for a while before I was ready to explore the next bit of the mathematical landscape.
(There’s fear in the mix too, of course – a child’s fear of straying beyond the safe circle of light cast by the family campfire. A familiar fear, and one that remained with me far beyond any usefulness it might have had. That’s a whole nother chest o’ balrogs, however, into which I don’t propose to delve just now.)
I think we do this in our creative lives as well
Intentionally making art – and even more so, intentionally returning to an art-making life in adulthood – is kind of huge.
Taking obvious next steps (such as implying that you think you’ve made good art, submitting pieces to the judgement of others, and so on) can feel a bit like suddenly counting up to fifty.
Reach. And stretch. You don’t go from just-about-touching-your-toes to curling-yourself-into-a-pretzel-at-the-drop-of-a-hat all in one jump.
It’ll come.
Learning happens in its own time.