Our October Read: The Curiosity of Children
Our featured guest is Chana Messinger, a math teacher as well as a creative and charitable thinker
The one constant of Tiny Book Club is good readings and thoughtful discussion. But I reserve the right to pluck those readings from anywhere. Last month, we had a chapter from an out-of-print book. This month, I’ve chosen an installment from Martyn Wendell Jones’s intermittent parenting newsletter “Dang.”
In his current, vigorous phase, Fox learns in the manner of a flood ascertaining the height of a levee. There is nothing idle about his curiosity: it propels him into every part of our house, where he pulls at every handle, lid, and drawer and pries loose things we never expected him to reach or even see. […]
Here is the beginning of knowledge: with the application of force—the rising flood of Fox’s endless curiosity—what gives, and what stays firm? These are the genetic roots of every scientific and philosophical project. What rolls when I push it, and what scrapes? Will this play-doh taste the same as it did last time? What will happen if I shake this? (In the last case, our upstairs rug will be covered in gold sequins, is what will happen.)
If you’ve had some of our other readings sitting in a tab, you should know that this month’s reading is very short. It punches above its weight.
Our guest for this month is Chana Messinger. Chana is a high school math teacher in New York City, and she’s one of my favorite people to disagree with. I can always trust her to take both the truth and me seriously at the same time.
I used to run Ideological Turing Tests once a year (a chance for people to check how well they understood people they disagreed with by trying to imitate them), and Chana won both Ms. Congeniality and Most Convincing. In more conventional accomplishments, she has a degree in math from the University of Chicago and a masters in Quantitative Methods in Social Science from Columbia.
The comments are open for your own thoughts and questions about curiosity and learning. They’ll help me shape my questions for Chana. As will Beatrice, who is at a very empirical age.
Ex libris,
Leah
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This was an interesting read.
I was trying to recall if I recalled thinking of this age as being so focused on enquiry. 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? Why do the adults seem so fixated on the eating of applesauce, when they have put no real exploration into its use as a hair styling aid?
Though it also struck me that having a child this age during the lockdown of March-April this year when the piece seemed to have been written must have been a very unique experience. As I was casting memories back to when our eldest was that age, I realized it was during a period when Cat and I had moved in with my dad's 93 year old mother to help provide her with live in care, and we were already pregnant with our second, and I had a commute which took me nearly two hours each way across the LA basin. No wonder my memories of that era were a bit vague.
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.
OK, in imitation of classical UY discourse I'm associating this with something vaguely math-y while ignoring most of the poetical and cute aspects:
A lot of this is actually about graph traversal! Things you ask/explore have follow-up relations. For example, 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.
Graph traversal is also a big part of what computer science is about. CS101 offers two extremist strategies: In depth-first-traversal you always explore the first follow-up and then the first follow-up to that and so on. The problem with that is, if the graph is infinitely deep like this one you never finish your first exploration. The other extreme strategy is what Fox is doing now: In breadth-first-traversal you start with your initially visible explorations and do them all before doing any of the follow-ups. Only after finishing the original explorations you do the same with your original follow-ups as next first-level explorations &c. That way you get to every exploration eventually, better then depth-first! But! In the long run it may not be optimal either, because you take very long getting not very deep and doing a lot of low-interest explorations such as yellow play-douh tastes just like blue play-doh. So eventually you probably adopt some sort of compromise strategy. The exact compromise varies from person to person, people who like more depth than most are called nerds, often x-nerds where x is a name for the region of the tree they are recursing in. But almost everybody eventually sacrifices a lot of breadth for depth, doing so less than most is sometimes called ADD.
But all such compromise strategies depend on special knowledge of how the graph looks like. In Martyn's imagery, you need to do a lot of minotaur thought to build your mental labyrinth in the first place. So for the moment Fox is doing optimal computer science!