My Inner Map of Old Paris and A Bothered Researcher

Posted on March 4, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

This morning, my six-year-old ran to me waving a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill.  She said,  Mom. Is this yours?  I found it on the breakfast table.  Can I have it?  Please?

I have no idea whose bill she held or why she found it where she did.  Regardless, I didn’t let her keep the bill.  I said Thank you, darling, and mumbled something about $20 being a lot of money.  Still, my daughter’s open-faced honesty and hope impressed me.  Her stance showed she had no real expectations of keeping the money–  but she’d try anyhow.  Just in case.  As she handed me the bill and walked away,  my 11 month old, sitting on the carpet two feet away, coughed several times. I bolted off the couch to her, swept the inside of her mouth with my index finger and removed a flat,  juicy piece of wicker.  My baby crawls fast enough now we’ve nicknamed her “speedy”.  She’s more than just speedy though, she’s efficient too.  She constantly collects stuff from the floor to investigate. She even has a method. Here’s how it goes: pick up object, move it from right hand to left. Turn it about in various directions and angles.  Then, either drop it or continue research and taste the thing.  Chew and swallow if possible.

Through all this excitement my two-year old stayed kneeling in front of and using the couch as her desk.  She spread a stack of index cards haphazardly except for her “done” pile.  The “done” cards, stacked together, exhibited various slashes, circles and more of color.  One blue.  One red.  She kept enlarging that “done” pile oblivious to the rest of us.  Focused but just following whims.

Babies and young children constantly try things out on a whim. Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnick says in her fascinating book, The Philosophical Baby,

Children are the R&D department of the human species– the blue-sky guys,  the brainstormers.

[Their] brains seem to have special qualities that make them especially well suited for imagination and learning.

Each try a child makes and each whim she chases ever-so-slightly changes the physical map of her very plastic brain. New information connects loosely to other (less new) bits to form networks of thought. We all have a zillion (OK, that’s not a true number, but it fits) connections running throughout our brains–  more complex than the Los Angeles highway system.  The younger you are the looser (bumpier and sub-developed) your connections and also the more varied.  Again, Gopnik says,

Babies brains are actually more highly connected than adult brains;  more neural pathways are available to babies than adults.

All these connections are loose, tentative and will fade with time and lack of use. They’re also jumbled about in a disorganized mess. But disorganized minds, whether attached to a baby, a teenager or a 40 yr. old, are more likely to come up with original ideas. Hyper-organized minds think in patterns and already know outcomes from the get-go.  Disorganized minds catch novel patterns but are open-wide about outcomes. Original thoughts have no precedents.

Louis Pasteur said,

Chance favors the prepared mind.

As it turns out chance favors a mind prepared on more than one dimension.  First, you need kick-butt skills– virtuosity.  The 10,000 hours of sweat put in.  Second, your brain needs a zillion loose neuronal connections with plenty of Glia for juice.  Entire sections of your brain need beautifully bumpy, tentative and divergent mental pathways–  like a map of old Paris.

My three little girls’ minds work just like that.  Yet, neuroscientists think my girls are less likely to keep disorganized (divergent-thinking) minds into adulthood than their brother.  Men  keep their childhood R&D capacities but women lose them in favor of more organized, predictable mental pathways.  That’s right folks, women’s thinking tends toward predictability and away from originality.  Since originality is a crucial part of creativity, I must ask:  Could this all be true?

Well.  It’s hard to swallow.  But read on.  Neuroscientist Kenneth M. Heilman found men store the bulk of verbal capacities in one hemisphere (the left),  leaving the other hemisphere (the right)  free for disorganized mental pathways.  Women use both hemispheres for verbal communication and so have less mental space  left for wild chance. Heilman also points out scientists, inventors and mathematicians need top-notch spatial skills to shine. And in test after test, men take the prize over women, in all spatial abilities.  And even in fields requiring rich language networks, men outperform women.  Why? Remember those darned language networks taking up so much mental space in both hemispheres.

Yikes.

I am a thinker,  so I will plod on without screaming or pulling my hair or crying into this evening.

Think about all the women you know and all the men you’ve ever met.  Make yourself a little mental chart and place each person into one of two categories: dependable/predictable thinker or unreliable/original thinker.  How many women make your unreliable/original thinker?  And of those who made it, how many have the education to rocket to the top of their field?  Still have some women on this list?  I hope you do.  This is the twenty-first century, after all.

Still, I’m hot and bothered.  Fortunately,  I’m not the only one.  Ten years ago, researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young began questioning neuroscientific gender studies. Eventually, she could stand it no longer.  So many studies she read simply did not jive with reality. So Jordan-Young spent 10,000 hours going over studies dated back to the 1950′s (actually even earlier).  Then she wrote Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, to peel the layers of untruth within the field.

Note:  If you are a Neuroscientist studying sex differences, please read this book.  It’s solid.

On my end,  I’ll make sure my daughters get the education they need.  I’ll also urge disorganized thought patterns.  I may even require (I’m still wishy-washy on this one) mega-time mastering video games (the spatial/visual– super-challenging kind)  starting tomorrow.

I’ve had enough of organized thought-patterns for now.  I’m hyped to feed my inner-disorganized thinker. I’ll start with fish. Hay. Egypt. Schools for Girls.  Sleepy limbs. Boston. Charles River.  MIT. Dream interpretation. Palm-readers and medical office-types named Kathy, Parkinson’s disease, oligarchies.  I’m gone….. lost in my own old-Paris-map of a brain.

How about you?  Do you think more men naturally tend toward originality than women?

*If you’d like to read more about this topic check out these posts: The Second, Less Creative Sex and Characteristics of highly Creative People:  Intro.

Filed under: Biology, Complexity, Divergent thinking, Must Haves of Creativity, Neuroscience, The Brain, The Child, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Creativity’s Terrain, Part 11: Place Yourself Well and Let Someone Point the Way

Posted on August 30, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Finding a Love and Attending to it for Life.

Highly Creative people need inspiration and a light on their path.

When Elizabeth Blackwell (first American woman to earn an MD) graduated from medical school in 1949, she had no place to intern or clinic to practice what she’d learned. Her adviser directed her to Paris, France to intern at La Maternité. She had to continue her training as a student midwife, not a physician.

Blackwell’s father educated all his children, girls and boys, alike and inspired her to love learning.  He died young, and although Blackwell had work as a teacher for many years to save money for medical school, she boarded with a physician’s family. There she spent free time reading medical texts and asking  hard questions at the dinner table.

In her turn, Blackwell inspired many women into medicine.  Today, 51% of medical students are female.

Recently, I sat next to Urologist Monisha Crisell at a dinner party.  I asked her if she liked her work, she said she loved it.  Intrigued that this classy-looking physician would have specialized on the male reproductive system, in the first place and continues to find meaning in helping men with erectile disjunction and kidney stones, performing vasectomies and treating prostate cancers, I said,

What made you decide to go into Urology?

She said,

I like urologists. They’re easy-going and funny.  Nice to work with.

She did say she liked the patients, as well.  But, the reason she’s a Urologist today is, urologists inspired her as a medical student.

Elizabeth Blackwell would have smiled knowing in the future, women in medicine would have such opportunities. But it is the work of Marie Zakrzewska (whom Blackwell mentored) that actually paved the way for Dr. Crisell to choose a specialty she enjoyed, rather than be limited to obstetrics.

In 1862, Marie Zakrzewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children and opened clinical training for female physicians to specialties beyond obstetrics.

Zakrzewska’s veterinarian grandmother and midwife mother took her along for house calls throughout her childhood. She watched cows labor and women deliver their children.  She trained as a midwife in her native Germany, at a time when professionally trained midwives were male. When she emigrated to the United States, a few years later, she found little support for a  woman in medicine, here as well. Elizabeth Blackwell encouraged her on to medical school. But, even as a physician, Zakrzewska struggled for respect and found no work.

Blackwell and her sister Emily (also a doctor) recruited Zakrzewska as the first resident physician for the hospital they founded, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

Creativity thrives on mentor-ship.  Mentors point to the right path and encourage would-be Creators, but they need not be Highly Creative themselves.

American poet, Maya Angelou’s mentor was her fourth grade teacher, not a poet herself, but she saw a spark in the little girl and knew where to direct her.  Angelou says,

Mrs. Flowers took me to the library in the black school.  The library was probably as large as a telephone booth.  It may have had 110 books in it, maybe.  She said, ‘I want you to read every book in this room.’

And I found poetry.

I consider that a lifeline, because finally, when I was about 12 and a half, almost 13, Mrs. Flowers–who would allow me to come to her house and she would read to me– she said, you will never really love poetry until you speak it, feel it across your tongue, over your lips.

Not every Highly Creative person has the same mentor, lifelong.  But placing yourself where a caring someone might direct you to the next step is crucial to creative development.


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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 7: Write to Express Ideas & Find Your Place in the World

Posted on August 24, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about the value of Reading, a lot.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin

Highly Creative people write.

Martha Graham, mother of Contemporary Dance, wrote draft, after draft, late into a thousand nights to translate her ideas into human movement. Graham said,

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer’s body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

Architect Christopher Alexander wrote many books, including The Order of Nature series, to empower future designers, both professional and amateur, to create work inspired by true human needs.

Nobel laureate Neurologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini published dozens of scholarly articles detailing her discovery of human Nerve Growth Factor, as well as In Praise of Imperfection, her autobiography.

Across domains, Highly Creative people communicate their ideas through the written word. They also write to understand their own ideas. Playwright, Joan Didion says,

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.

American writer, Ernest Hemingway said,

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Creator and mentor to Artists across disciplines, Julia Cameron, recommends keeping a large notepad and paper by your bed to write as soon as you wake up, everyday.  She says,

In order to find our creativity–or for that matter, our spirituality–we must begin where we are.

Cameron recommends using writing as a compass. She says,

The tool that best helps us find our spiritual bearings is called Morning Pages…

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand stream of consciousness that locate us precisely in the here and now.  They are written first thing upon awakening and they tell us–and the Universe–what we like, what we don’t like, what we wish we had more of, and what we wish we had less of, and what we wish, period.

So, write to find where you are and what you need to be Creative. And write to explain yourself and your ideas to the world.  But, write.

Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Idea Sharing, Must Haves of Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 5: Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers

Posted on July 31, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Fighting Entropy in the Renaissance.

While Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo perspired, inspired, someone paid for the bread they ate and the shoes they walked in. Most 16th Century men with families to support and trade to conduct made no time for domain-alteration in Creative endeavors. The wealthiest men, patronized inspired, intellectual, hard-working men. Still, theoretically, all men could indulge in creative pursuit, even if only on the side.

But the woman who made salads for Da Vinci or washed Michelangelo’s bed-sheets could not, at least theoretically. A women painting heart-stopping biblical violence in oil or discovering mathematical theorems was as likely as a wild dog chanting prayers in a monastery.

Yet, a handful of women in the Renaissance did alter their domains.

Artemisia Gentileschi, member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence, spent 10,000 hours as a child in her father’s busy studio. In her father’s shadow, and under his loving direction, she lived and breathed all things Caravaggio and was able to say,

As long as I live I will have control over my being.

Self-control, not a woman’s privilege in the Renaissance, is a must-have  of Creativity. Gentileschi knew this and presented her Creative gift wrapped in the cloak of womanhood.

My illustrious lordship,

Gentileschi said,

I’ll show you what a woman can do.

By age 7, Elena Piscopia spent her days with her father, among books: Latin and Greek, grammar and music before lunch, then Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

She tackled mathematics and astronomy,  philosophy and theology. Awed by her progress, Elena’s father insisted she attend the University of Padua, whose motto was Universal Freedom, to continue her studies. In 1678, she graduated, the first woman to receive a university diploma ever — Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who earned the Doctor of Philosophy and Mathematics.  She stayed on as a professor to lecture behind a curtain to prevent other University attendants from seeing her face to face.

Both ladies worked long and hard, both were inspired initially by their fathers and both were highly intellectual, and they also had self-control and someone who truly believed they were capable, both gifts in their time, yet ultimately indispensable to Creation.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Must Haves of Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Playful & Responsible

Posted on June 30, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Was it for this I uttered prayers,

And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,

That now, domestic as a plate,

I should retire at half-past eight?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poet Vincent Millay seems to kick the stairs just as often as an exasperated adult.

What does it mean to be a grown-up?  Not much freedom? Responsibility.  Responsibility.  Responsibility?  Creators exhibit a paradoxical combination of youth’s playfulness and mature discipline. Responsibility and irresponsibility are both key in Creative work.

Creativity researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says,

There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals.

Theoretical physicist, John Wheeler says the most important thing in a young physicist is,

this bounce, which I always associate with fun in science, kicking things around.  It’s not quite joking, but it has some of the lightness of joking.  It’s exploring ideas.

But discipline driven by responsibility must also be close at hand.  Csikszentmihalyi says

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.

Inventor Jacob Rainbow pretends he’s in jail to get through the perspiration of Creative work.  He says,

If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence.  In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it will take a week.  What else have I got to do?  I’m going to be here for twenty years…

You just forget everything except that it’s got to be built.

This focus is impossible if you don’t know what you are building.  If you don’t have your Creative work, you need to find it first.  You need to search until you find it so you can sob and curse as often as you wish, and have your own poetry to show for it.

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Inspiring Conversations Needed

Posted on June 10, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

My early parenthood days, with Mozart and Maria Callas as background music to diaper changing time needed more talking, just regular human speech.  One particularly quiet Thursday, I began forcing myself to think out loud.  At first I had no coherent thoughts to verbalize.  My brain wandered from impressions and smells to half-finished sentences to longing fried Polenta for dinner. I started making up thoughts to share with my cooing baby girl.  The carpet is so green here in your room.  The green matches the green outside.  Like the grass and the big trees down the street. This is not normal speech, little love, but it’s a start.  I won’t have you growing up like Hellen Keller, in a silent world. By the weekend, so proficient had I become at thinking out loud and making up one-sided conversations, my husband, working in another room, kept answering the pointless questions I asked my baby.

Now, my home filled with children, their friends, extended family, et al., I no longer need to make up interesting speech.  But, I have a related challenge.  We need more conversations, the inspiring and thought-provoking kind. Eleanor Roosevelt said

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Some days, we don’t even make it to discussing people! Because interesting conversations serve as road signs directing Creative thought, my family needs more than an occasional memorable conversation.  How do I get us more memorable conversations, especially since I am often the only adult around to start one?

Here’s my plan:

  1. Think up interesting conversation starters of topics (reading the New York Times once a week will help), write them down on a pad and take my pad full of conversation ideas to dinner.  Then, of course, speak without talking down to the kids.
  2. When I come up blank with conversation starters, use the big screen to watch TED conferences.  Make comments, as I think of them, about ideas being presented and invite others seated at the table to do the same.
  3. Find interesting adults to have for dinner, twice a month.  When my newborn is a little bigger, we’ll go to once a week, just like the Einsteins.

Every Thursday, medical student Max Talmud ate lunch with young Albert Einstein and family.  Historian Denis Brian writes:

Sensing the youngster’s intellectual hunger, Talmud often fed him tidbits of the latest scientific breakthroughs, recommended groundbreaking scientific authors, and discussed mathematics and philosophy as if he and Albert were contemporaries.

Albert flourished in this atmosphere and showed his prowess when Uncle Jakob turned up for lunchtime seminars armed with tricky math problems.

I’ll keep you posted on how my plan works out.


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Playing Alone and With Others

Posted on June 8, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Creativity requires deep knowledge.  An aspiring novelist must read 5,000 books to gain a foothold on Literature. A dreamy cosmologist must master physics, chemistry, astronomy and even philosophy to come up with a viable Theory of Everything.  Any Creator must know the mold of her domain to break it. Rules come first, then free play. Children function like this, especially when playing alone. They test the rules of  physics and those set by parents. Once rules are intrinsic, true freedom emerges. Creators master their domain often in solitude, but punctuated by intense social interaction. Again, a lot like children.  After playing alone, healthy children love to work things out  with playmates.  This dichotomy children often exhibit: the ability to play alone for long periods of time but also with others is also characteristic of highly Creative people.

The stereotype of the solitary creative genius is well supported by research.  After all, Creativity scholar Csikszentmihalyi says,

one must generally be alone in order to write, paint, or do experiments in a laboratory. As we know from studies of young talented people, teenagers who cannot stand being alone tend not to develop their skills because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.

But an appreciation of solitary work does not stand alone. Csikszentmihalyi found,

Only teens who can tolerate being alone are able to master the symbolic content of a domain.  Yet, over and over again, the importance of seeing people, hearing people, exchanging ideas, and getting to know another person’s work and mind are stressed by creative individuals.

Children who master the art of playing alone and play happily with others are laying down a cognitive foundation for the methodologies of Creative work. In both play situations extrinsic motivation is entirely absent. Yes, many rules learned by children have been preset by adults in some way or another.  But play;  play is free, a lot like Creation.

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Creativity and Follow Through

Posted on June 4, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals…but, this playfulness does not go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Most people with great ideas squander them because they don’t follow through with time and work.  After the eureka moment of insight and joy comes work, lots of it. In an interview with Csikszentmihalyi, sculpter Nina Holton says:

Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say “What’s so wonderful?’ I mean, its like being a mason, or being a carpenter, half the time…The germ of the idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there.  So the next stage, of course, is the hard work…And sculpture is that, you see. It is the combination of wonderful wild ideas and then a lot of hard work.

Fantastic ideas often live and die only as such, never moving past the thought stage to execution. Scott Belsky wrote Making Ideas Happen to help idea junkies overcome the obstacles between vision and reality. He suggests using progress as a motivational force to keep working on a project.

Why throw away the evidence of your achievements when you can create an inspiring monument to getting stuff done? he asks.

His company, Behance, has several walls decorated with records of completed tasks from projects–often notebook pages of checked off actions and index cards with descriptions of features they have added to their website.  When we feel mired in the thick of a creative project, Belsky says, we can look up and see the wake of progress that trails behind us. Surrounding yourself with progress helps you focus.

So, in an effort to highlight the joys of project completion, our kitchen glass sliding door has transcended its original intent into a “DONE!!!” monument to productivity, a-la Behance-style. It is now plastered with evidence of finished projects proudly displayed by my children and me. Nobody is making anyone do any of these projects, they are totally self-determined.  Not all are creative.  My 8yr. wants to read a book a day this month and he’s sticking up photocopied covers of finished books. My 6 yr. old is proud to be reading sentences now, so she’s put up evidence of that.  I’m happy to have re-designed a college History course for this coming Fall, and there is the evidence, taped to the glass.

Pretty? Not really.  Inspiring? Yep.

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Creativity and Energy

Posted on June 3, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

My three children (10, 8 and 6) are “relaxing” today. Each is sprawled to maximize comfort in the grand central space we call The Music Room.  Our old piano is here and our shelves are stuffed with great books.  There are Kapla blocks to build with and a wooden castle with queens and kings to play with.  But, no one is playing or building or imagining anything. With eyes slightly glazed over, they are only half- listening to their audio book,  Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Mom, can I have computer time? says my 8yr. old.

Yes, I say. Set yourself a timer for thirty minutes.

I had an epiphany watching him peel himself off the couch, walk over at a snail’s pace and click to a game a preschooler would find simple. I asked myself, “Why is he so low on energy?”  “Could listening to a reader intentionally trying to sound low energy, reading a mediocre book about a wimpy middle-schooler affect him so much?”

Probably yes.

Every thing we do and all that surrounds us gives or takes energy. My children were not relaxing.  They were bleeding energy.  I needed to stop the bleed.

Highly Creative individuals are experts at controlling their energy. Creative persons, writes Creativity scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

are not hyperactive, always “on”, constantly churning away.  In fact, they often take rests and sleep a lot.  The important thing is that the energy is under their own control–it is not controlled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule.  When necessary they focus it like a laser beam; when it is not, they immediately start recharging their batteries.

Once I realized computer time would not recharge my little boy’s energy, I told him so, gave him a glass of cool water to drink and sent him outside.  My game change worked.  His 6 yr. old sister followed him out and off they ran to plan some mischief. I don’t know if he’ll come back to draw or write or bake his own creation, but his energy level is high out there, underneath the trees.  I can tell by the way he moves.

And, I just threw away that lousy, energy-depleting audio book.


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Curiosity: Part III

Posted on March 28, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.  -Lillian Smith

Creative Curiosity, like an oyster with a pearl, holds the most precious gift for Creation:  the perfect question.

Productive scientists, artists, writers and others ask many questions to solve problems and progress in their work. The creme de la creme, the most Creative ones, are better than their colleagues at judging unproductive questions from the pearls.

Inventor Jacob Rainbow says:

You must have the ability to get rid of the trash which you think of…you get many [questions] appearing and you discard them because you’re well trained and you say, ‘that’s junk.’ And when you see the good one you say, ‘Oops, this sounds interesting. Let me pursue that a little further.’

Once a great question is stumbled on, the Creator can fashion it to perfection and use it to direct her Creative work.  Psychologist Csikszentmihaly, in studying Creators found most worked on one, two or a very select few questions throughout their entire lives. Truly great questions take a very long time to answer.

Questions are Curiosity translated into words. Creative Curiosity has three components: Emotion, Time and Future (See Curiosity Part II post).  Since works of Creativity are answers to grand questions, living a Creative Life includes translating the Emotion component of Curiosity into questions.

Children are born curious. The mother-newborn bond begins with curiosity. Both the mother and infant experience Creative Curiosity with all three components at play (Curiosity: Part II post ) once the chaos of giving birth gives way to a moment of calm, when the mother can finally hold her baby and gaze at the incredible new being. This is the bonding extolled by Attachment Theorists.

The varying degree of Curiosity children exhibit as they develop is the product of life experience and genetic inclination. Since all were born with Curiosity, all may enhance it.

The Questions Contest my children and I have been experimenting with this week is based on the idea that question-generation is a useful tool of Curiosity that may be enhanced through deliberate practice.

The main function of this weeks Questions Contest is to provide me with data on how each person reacts and processes this contest so I can tailor a more effective question generation tool for each one.

The contest is supposed to end today, with a little celebration,  but we are not ready to end quite yet.  Our contest was interrupted last Thursday by a little glitch called lack of internet access and a beautiful new Creation born a little early, of which I will write more soon.  For now, below are some of my notes on the progression of the Questions Contest.  More to come.

Notes on Question Contest:

Roxy (5) got right to work on the contest.  She opened her notebook and began numbering each line of the second page.

Mom?

She stopped writing.

Yes?

How do you write the number that comes after 21?

She concentrated as if I may not be able to answer and she’d better figure this out herself.

Twenty-two, Roxy.  22.

Oh, yeah.  Thanks, Mom.

She got to the bottom of the page, propped her notebook on her bent legs and wrote with greater concentration while rocking herself in the glider chair.  I leaned in and peeked over her shoulder to see 3/4ths of the lines already graced with Roxy’s version of cursive writing. She caught me looking.

Oh, mom, I’m writing the questions in my language.

She glanced at Vance than Frankie.  They looked up from their notebooks, expectant and visibly unsure how I would fix this.  I said,

Great, Roxy.  I’m glad to see you have so many already.

She smiled and got back to work.  But Vance and Frankie were not smiling.

Maaahm, if you let her do that, she’ll win because she can write faster that way and anyway those aren’t real questions and

I interrupted Frankie by addressing Roxy,

Roxy? Would you be willing to share one of your questions with us, right now?

Roxy straightened in her chair and “read” :

How many books are in the shelves in this room?

She paused,

How many tadpoles are living in the pond right now and what makes them grow and become frogs at the same time, all of them? And how many of the tadpoles Frankie saved from a puddle will survive now that she put them in the big pond and what

Thanks, Roxy.

I said,

Keep writing more questions.  You can share more of them with us later today.  We’ll ring the bell three times today to check our progress.  I’m going to write some questions too.

Vance and Frankie relaxed and defocused on their notebooks; they liked the idea of me participating with them.  Roxy got back to numbering every line on every page of her red notebook.

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