[ 중요한 영어 어휘 ] Encourage / Encouraging / Encouragement

“It’s always dark. The sky if not grey, is black. The snow thigh high slowly grows waist deep. But the tall woman, her dark shawl pulled taut, walks on anyway. The tall woman walks alone, deeper into the woods among a crowd of trees she finds her place”

— Sujata Bhatt, from “She Finds Her Place”, Collected Poems

When you decide to touch a woman

Remember who gave you hands

When you crush her with words

Remember who gave you a tongue

When her heart cracks open and flows like a red river

Remember who will make your heart stop

(I hope God cuts off every part of you that was used to hurt a woman)

𝒃𝒂𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒚 𝒃𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒉

02/27/2021

It feels warm inside.

Like a boiling well that makes you feel fuzzy;

Its water ascends so as to reach the furthest parts of the body.

Its heaviness is counteracted by how lightweight the body feels.

It reminds me of the aftereffects of getting drunk.

I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.

- Jean Piaget 1896-1980

How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.

One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.

As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?

Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.

Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”

Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.

Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.

Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.

Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.

This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.

At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.

We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.

For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.

Feelings are feral things

Half of them want to be free

Half of them want to stay in their cage

Thing is

You can't leave the door open halfway

.

And you can't take the sound of them

Banging on the bars

Shrieking to be loosed

And you can't look them in the eye

Or you'll go insane

.

Feelings are feral things

Half of them want to be free

Half of them want to stay in their cage

Thing is

You can't open the door halfway

.

You can visit them sometimes

The pieces of you that live in a zoo

Just remember -- don't feed the animals

And never give the tiger the key.

ɴᴏᴍ ɴᴏᴍ 😋

You’re smiling at me like the gate is closed and there’s nowhere for me to go.

You’re smiling like I still want you

through all the slurring, the blurring of your addiction and the cold, long winter of your silence.

You’re smiling like we’re living a party, baby and my eyes aren’t on that neon exit.

You’re smiling like I’m a boomerang, destined to circle back right into your hand

to relive that experience.

Your biggest insult to me.

— s. lee { x }

Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it.

The War Boys (2009)

Pastel Lockscreen

Credit : @Argodeonn on twitter

“The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.”

— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me