Reading Quest 1

I had a lot of difficulty with this, as I found everything we read very understandable. It was interesting, sure, and I quite enjoyed the subject, but I couldn't think of anything I really wanted to discuss further. I I suppose it would've been interesting to further explore successful learning styles, as demonstracted  by AI in chapter two, section two. The fact that many people don't think of mistakes as productive is an interesting commentary on society and how we currently define learning versus what has been shown to be successful.

That there, above, is what I submitted (late) and now I'm going to talk about it.

I've been studying psychology for two and a half years, and what interests me is far more in the psychology side of the book than the culture, though I suppose culture is what dictates how we expect to learn. One of the studies in the book talks about how when a child is told they are smart instead of a hard worker, they go on to fail hard and harder, as they become discouraged when they realize smarts can't help them through everything. It talked about how on the other side, children who were told that they had tried really hard were much more successful and productive. This intrigues me, as the children who work hard because they're told that's what they're good at (hard work) accept mistakes much more easily than children who expect themselves to be smart and understand. As the book showed, mistakes are the things that actually end up teaching us the most, so the fact that teachers and parents would partake in any activity shown to close children to the helpfulness of messing up seems wrong. I believe that the only proper course of action would be to spread that information as far and wide as possible, so as to allow as many children as possible to be taught that mistakes are not just okay, but a great thing. It occurs to me that people with high IQs, who were provably book smart would have more difficulty instinctively grasping the concept that messing up is good. Kids who are sent out into the world to fall down and drop things and break windows, it would seem, would grasp this much more readily, as they have the stories to show that the times they messed up were the ones they remembered and learned the most from. In contemporary society, with video games, this seems even more true. Kids play games and explore and the way many games go, their character dies and dies and dies and they learn where to go, what to do, what to avoid, and how to play. If this concept were more readily accepted and then they were encouraged to apply it to daily situations, maybe learning curves would rise. I don't know. It's an interesting thought. 

Anyway.....