dabbling

"Everyone for what he likes - we like to be
Heads down, tails up, dabbling free!" ---K. Grahmm (sp?)

When I was filling out the fs@h "learning plan" I was strongly tempted to skip over the box marked "foreign language". At that time, just out of school, Ray seemed to have no interest in languages other than English. It was a remnant of my own public schooling that prompted me (write anything! just don't leave it blank!) combined with a somewhat more noble belief that everything is connected, and learning is all about connections. So I wrote: Emphasis on global awareness and left it at that.

Six months after moving in, I'm starting to see a transition in Rayan. He's starting to expand his interests and awareness. He's choosing - completely independently - to learn new things. He is currently doing this by the time-honored method of dabbling.

Kids are regularly encouraged to "stick with" new interests, even after the interest wanes. Kids and adults who pick up and put down interest after interest and project after project, leaving older loves and skills behind, are seen as lazy or undisciplined or lacking some other, essential quality. And yet inventors, artists, and autodidacts across history have very often been dabblers. Archimedes and DaVinci are probably the most famous for this, poking their noses into everything imaginable, and going on to imagine new things besides. Franklin and Edison are popular dabblers from US history and much admired. Schools go so far as to attempt to teach dabbling - its called getting a well-rounded liberal arts education. But for all that, dabbling has fallen into disfavor.

Rayan is dabbling in foreign languages and, in the process, is expanding his awareness of other lands and cultures.

Runescape started it (humbling, to realize how much learning takes place as a result of this game) . Its played internationally, and in the pursuit of virtual commerce and less lag time, Ray discovered some servers set up for German users. Its possible to get translations for posts between members, but all the on-screen information is in German. Ray quickly began picking up useful vocabulary, and is probably the only teen in the county who can now shop for weapons and armor in German.

A few months ago, that would have been enough for him but, as I said, he's changing. The deschooling interlude is fading into true autodidacticism. Ray wanted more. George showed him Bable Fish and they looked a few things up together. The boy who still claims to hate reading then proceeded to spend hours researching his topic of choice. Take that, public education.

German's a pretty intimidating language in print, though, so Ray got his fill of it quickly. The desire for more lingered, though, sending him to research Italian, briefly, and spend an entire evening simply looking up different languages and asking to which countries/nationalities they belonged. Mandarin and Urdu, Sanskrit and Yiddish, Arabic - that one threw me. With all the hoo-haa in the Middle East, is it really possible he didn't know one country where Arabic was spoken? He kept searching and pondering. I reassured him there was no need to pick one language or to "stick with it" even if he did. He remained restless and dissatisfied, still wanting more.

Maria Montessori wrote about young children arriving at a state she called "normalization", focused concentration on their work. I've seen this state in Ray playing computer games. Now I've seen it with an "academic" pursuit (take that, again, public schools).

Eventually Ray settled on Gaelic and Ireland as a specific realm of interest. I'm used to those being more favored by hippies and folk musicians than bad-boy metalheads and skaters, so I was a little surprised. Ray's been fascinated by Ireland for some time, but has had little opportunity to learn about it. So he's dabbling in the subject. He'll do some reading and leave it for a day...learn a handful of words and drop it for a week. He's serious and intent, but its not one of those overwhelming passions, like the one that led to Morgan drawing nonstop for weeks and the house looking like an explosion in a comic-book factory.

Dabbling can be a transitional stage of learning. Some people (adults and kids) dabble around in a subject until they reach a comfort or skill level, and then dive in. Dabbling can be a means to finding the right niche. I think it is in this kind of dabbling that Ray is engaged, currently. Others are life-long dabblers, immersing themselves in a subject for a time, and then moving on. Our friend, Mirror, is this kind of dabbler, as are some of those famous dabblers of history.

In the long term, it doesn't really matter if Ray is the kind of guy who dabbles to get his feet wet or occupationally. What's important is that he understands his own natural process and is comfortable with that.

In the shorter term, all y'all family and friends reading and lurking, keep your eyes open for any resources you can throw his way. Given Ray's other interests, anything related to Irish punk music, the IRA, religious warfare or other aspects of Ireland's bloody history might interest him. Just keep in mind what I'm saying about dabbling. In a few months, Ireland may be passe.

Or he may be reading Finnegan's Wake for fun.
You just never know.