Highlights on Curiosity
Some of my favorites from your comments in October
Thank you all for your lively discussion on children and curiosity this month! I loved discussing Martyn Wendell Jones’s essay with you all, and it was a pleasure to interview Chana Messinger on what sparks her own curiosity, and how she invites her students to be curious.
Before we begin our next read (and I reveal our next guest), I want to spotlight some of your comments throughout the month.
MG posed a question about enthusiastic curiosity vs distractive curiosity. (The latter feels more compulsive and a lot less fun). I pointed toward the Summa, where Aquinas describes the form of curiosity that is a vice:
Curiosity, in our present use of the word, is the vice which stands opposed to studiousness. Curiosity throws aside the moderating influence of studiousness, and disposes man to inordinateness in seeking knowledge. This inordinateness appears in a variety of ways. Thus: (a) a man may seek knowledge to take pride in it; (b) he may seek to know how to sin; (c) he may seek useless knowledge and waste effort which should be expended in learning what he needs to know.
Gilbert, who has been a valued commenter since one of my first blogs, framed curiosity in terms of search optimization—how does a child choose between depth-first and breadth-first ways of exploring?
Fox is starting out with a lot of things to pull on. Some of these lead to reactions and then he could either next explore something that changed or appeared (follow-up) or he could just pull on something different and see what happens there. So basically possible explorations are nodes of a graph connected by the follow-up relation as edges. Fox wants to find a big and interesting number of explorations fast, or in math to rapidly traverse a big and interesting part of the graph.
There’s a nice animation of these two strategies here. I anticipate I’ll still have trouble explaining to a child that I altered a beloved recipe in an attempt to make sure you’re not stuck on a purely local optimum.
I liked Brendan Hodge’s description of the private world of children (especially children who outnumber the adults):
In general, the impression that I have of children this age is of an intelligent but somewhat alien creature. He does not yet really follow how our language works, though he seems to have some of his own and he has moments of communication breakthrough when he understands what we say or communicates his desires or impressions. He does not really see why it is that we encounter things the way that we do, nor why he should follow our methods if his own seem more interesting. Why do the grown-ups insist on showing him that his little wooden train can be rolled, when it's clearly much more interesting to decide exactly how it tastes? […]
And while, of course, each baby goes through this age, it's a different experience for a baby with other small children in the family as well. I think it was our third, at this age, who would toddle after the older two calling out one of her first words, "Guys! Guys!" There was a small tribe of persons who looked at the world in a <5 kind of way, and in some ways they formed their own child-view world which we interacted with as outsiders.
I should mention that Brendan and Cat Hodge both have novels out. Brendan’s If You Can Get It is a novel of two dissimilar sisters thrown together to find a new stability. And Cat’s Unstable Felicity is—I kid you not—a Christmas novella blending the tensions of King Lear with a Hallmark Channel romcom. It has no right to work, but it does.
Elsewhere in reading, I’ve placed a library hold on The Scientist in the Crib on Melanie Bettinelli’s recommendation.
Ex libris,
Leah