Adult education

Adult education can learn much from child education where the education of the senses is considered important.

I am studying the former, and am learning the latter.

Johannes Brahms

The second movement of Brahms's Symphony No.4 is my most favourite music; I feel it's about forgivingness. The symphony, indeed Brahms's whole life, is about overcoming anger and achieving integrity. It worths a lifetime's pursuit. I always compare his character with mine. I love the stories about his relationship with Clara Schumann.

The Banking approach to child education

Tell me, where in the globe besides this city-state:

1. More and more local parents talk to their babies not in mother tongue but only in a foreign language (even though the parents themselves don't master it well, and the grandparents can't participate in their conversation), with a view to make their kids more "competitive" when later going to the school admission interview?
2. The so-called "early childhood education" means that, the toddlers as young as 3 (95% of 3~6 go to kindergartens in Hong Kong) have to learn "two languages three dialects" and "information technology", and to receive formal "writing skill training" (drilling)?

In this world's most capitalist city, arguably school (and increasingly even preschool) is the antithesis to education. It is a place where self-directed learning is discouraged and even punished, and it is also the place where children learn that learning is not fun, or that learning is not for the sake of learning per se.

Lifestyle Diversity and Choices

I was the guest speaker to the City University course "Lifestyle Diversity and Choices" on the past Monday, and talked about fatherhood to over 40 students. How wonderful during the whole 80 minutes of my sharing, DS was so calm sitting in the front of the class and playing his excavator and jigsaw puzzles!

Am I asking him too much? :-)

Most of the time, DS is the only kid who helps the adults dissemble the playroom floor mats after a playgroup session - the teacher of the class loves him so much! At home, I just let him help me do the housework whenever the tasks are appropriate. Sometimes he is too willing and insistent to help that he must be involved! Belows are some of the photos taken over a year. No photo was being taken (because I had to make sure he was safe) when he removed the potatoes with a pair of tongs from the hot oven !

Wiping the floor @ 9.m.o....

"DS, you may stop. The floor is already clean."



Scooping uncooked rice out with a measuring cup (not shown here) and inspecting the bugs...
Switching on the cooker in a very hot and windowless kitchen...

"Cutting" the water melon...

Putting back the toys after playing...


Vacuum cleaning...

...and wet dusting...

Feeding our beloved cat...

Helping separate Pok Choy's leaves from stems.

Turning the salad spinner...

Peeling the pomelo...
...and the orange...

Peeling the hard-boiled egg...

(he was very serious)

...and more!

Only 24.5 months old, he loves doing housework and is proud of himself!

Excavators

An elder cousin (5) of DS only loves buses, and he has dozens of toy buses. On the other hand, DS loves all kinds of trucks( he can distinguish between truck-mounted crane ["吊雞車"] and hook-lift truck ["勾斗車"]!). He can name (in Chinese) over twenty trucks, but he loves excavators most( he sees them everywhere- it is because there are always major and minor dusty construction works around the city! :-( ).

Some of his daily activities, then, is playing excavator toys/ puzzles, reading books on diggers, asking us to draw them on the paper (and now I encourage him to draw in his own way too) , or watching, listening to and singing along with Youtube videos/songs about the machine (well as I said before I limit this guided screen-watching to at most 30 minutes per day and only on occasional days)....

To make the digger toy more interesting, I have also taught DS how to attach the clamshell of it to other hand-tool toys: the screwdriver, the hammer, the pilers, etc. so that the excavator can now not only dig but also grasp, lift, drill, hit, and cut, like a real transformable hydraulic excavator! (By the way, constructing new, complex and more powerful commands by combining simple but self-sufficient commands is in line with the spirit of Unix, not M$ Windows!) :-) DS likes to stack wooden blocks on his table until the stack is taller than him, then push each block of the "multi-storey building" down one by one with the pilers attached to the excavator - it becomes a demolition game!

Several days ago we also discovered a new fun way to play. We sat in a row (I sat behind him), and I leaned my right arm out of his chair. When DS was moving two plastic tubes ("the control levers") with his hands towards certain directions, my arm and hand ("the boom, the bucket and the shovel") also moved accordingly. "The aim" was to put the "bucket" into a dump-truck toy. DS likes this role play activity very much and has asked me to play with him every night since then! Scoop!

Ha ha... I have become a paper-expert of the excavator because I (have to) know the names of every part of it, how it moves and how to control it except that I never really drive one! ;-P I guess I indulge in excavators too!

"This is the work I really love... because that's what's an excavator does...."

Perhaps later we can integrate the learning of science, music, arts, language, etc. into the theme of excavators for this child! Education and learning can be fun, whole and self-directed!

Interview in Babynews II

My second interview in Babynews magazine (Baby親子雜誌), Issue 196, 03/2010, pp.80-81. Click image to enlarge.

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