‘Thank you’ to those of who you took time off to try the activity!
To the rest of you who are wondering, “What’s the big deal?” Here is an insight into the activity.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” is a famous quote by Anais Nin, an author. A deep philosophical statement as it might seem has a simple meaning – the world is an abstract place. Many things as they exist around us are not well defined, right from a tiny particle to the vast space.
Inventions happen when a human being is able to define a concrete structure out of the abstract. Science is nothing but the evolution of abstractness into a predictable behavior. Hence, it takes a genius to see something “abstract” in a scheme of things that appear “normal” to most of us. It is these geniuses who have made history with their inventions.
The activity given to you is one such “abstractness”. The question is too vague for a number of reasons:
- Many children would have viewed it as choose among the pair of vessels instead of a complete set (As children are often given pairs of objects for comparison)
- Most adults would have viewed the question as a whole instead of a set of pairs (as we adults can read and interpret meaning while children would “visually” understand the question instead of the verbal comprehension)
- Finally, the question talks of Volume (which can hold more). From the figure given, none of us can accurately say which vessel can hold more as the shape of each vessel is different and the one that looks bigger might not necessarily have more volume.
As parents we do not let our children “Think” differently. In this case, if I had thought the answer to the question is the Big Pot in the second row and my child had colored the bigger of the two in each pair then, I would have corrected my child. Is my child really wrong? It is the way she viewed (perceived) the question. The activity is subtle reflection of how we direct our children to think the way the majority of us think and not allow their intellectual potential to burgeon.
Lateral thinking is evident in early childhood. The ability to see something differently occurs naturally to children as their schema is yet to be crystallized. It is we who “box” our child’s thinking ability! Before we jump the gun and correct our children, let’s take a moment to work our brains and see if what our child thinks is a possibility too. Who knows you might be having a little genius at home!
Oh! Wait, what is the answer to the question? Well, all your answers are right! (based on how you perceived the question) Long live the genius in you.