Children and collecting – Part 2 – TSWBAT and how to apply them to your children
Sometimes I am a teacher, and while most of my teaching has been to adults, I have also taught high school. So it seems to me that I would do well to write about children and collecting from a teacher’s point of view. I have no children of my own, and I’m not entirely sure that this is a disadvantage. I have a more global vision of the subject, I think. For example, are you the parent of a novice collector who has brought home all the creepy crawlies he has found and left them loose around the house?
Or are you -like me- an uncle who has things and ideas to share with a niece or nephew -and
my sisters take care of the consequences. Or are you a parent who has a beloved X collection and hopes to share your love of the subject with his children? In fact, is your child young enough to feel your excitement and joy, or has he reached the age where picking up X is “like… totally tired -for sure- I mean, like… . .so gay”. (There are no opinions on ‘gay’, but I learned from one of my nieces that ‘gay’ is not necessarily a slur, but refers to something outside the universe of the speaker. In my time, or perhaps a little earlier, we would have used the word ‘square’).
Here I blatantly plagiarize myself. (See below for a link to the entire article.)
Teachers do all sorts of things to keep our students motivated/ready/willing/awake enough 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’s a gazetteer and/or large world map somewhere in the house, education HAS to follow. A word of caution 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 children. Let them follow their own interests.
So how do you use picking to spark curiosity and prevent what emerges from being a battle of wills to get the kid to clean up every day and keep going for the long haul? And — maybe, just maybe — carry a childhood whim into adulthood. (F’rinstance, a guy named Greg Martin had a hobby 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 bât) and list what the student will be able to do… Not a bad idea. Starting at the bottom is the foundation of most planning efforts, but the value here has to do with opening up your thinking. For example, it would be nice to take the previous example of stamp collecting and have the goal of “teaching geography”. But you’d better say to yourself, “Little Johnny will receive a stamp and envelope that have been mailed from each of the 50 states and he
you’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 does Jay-Walking and asks people on the sidewalk where Europe is and someone guesses it’s the capital? from Canada? I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’m a teacher.)
Now, when they tried to teach me this about planning in various b’ness classes I’ve had to take, I seem to remember that after we define where we want to be when we get there, we start planning the steps necessary to get there. . It seems reasonable. What is perhaps a little unreasonable, however, is the amount of things that a child insists that he needs to get the job done. But then again, maybe not. Please remember, she thought, that childhood is about trying a lot of things and letting go of some, or maybe even most of it, in favor of what will become his passions.
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