Lies to Children

That was a fascinating article. I mostly agree with what was said, and I agree with the general proposition of crafting explanations based on partial truths. I've tried explaining this to others who build presentations and workshops that the human mind has trouble absorbing facts if it doesn't have a contextual framework in which to place the facts. I don't believe I'm alone in this belief -- I've heard the same thing from others.

For a child, their contextual framework has to be very limited. For example, the distinction between mass and weight is difficult enough for me to grasp let alone a 6 year old. The concept of the heft of something (for lack of a better substitute word for mass or weight) is based on how hard they have to strain to lift it. To them, mass=weight ... same thing; and the notion of gravity having something to do with weight but not mass is just fuse-blowing stuff. Want to watch a child's mind spin? Ask them how much the earth "weighs." The concept of lifting the earth is utterly foreign. The answer you'll get is probably "a lot!" And that'll probably be based on an extrapolation -- my backpack is very heavy; my bed is much bigger than my backpack, so it must be even heavier; my house is bigger still; the earth is way bigger ... therefore, a lot.

Note: I wonder if kids grasp the concept of density. A big block of foam weighs almost nothing. Would a small child who hadn't yet experienced it think they could lift it? I doubt it.

I have a real learning disability in this regard -- if I can't place some new fact in context, I will stop learning anything else that comes along until I get that one point. Honestly, I've lost whole classes because of some point offered at the beginning I didn't get.

That also explains why I do so poorly at sales or consulting. If the customer says "X" and I don't understand what they mean by "X," then pretty much everything else they say will be lost.

And my problem of late is that so much of what's coming my way is new -- I have almost no contextual framework to hang things on. So I'm stumbling about.