Children? How about everyone?
"You begin to write because there is nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing else to do. It's very freeing being creative for no other reason other than you freewheel and fill time."
March 24, 2013
"When children have nothing to do now, they immediately switch on the TV, the computer, the phone or some kind of screen...."
"But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them."
Children? How about everyone?
Children? How about everyone?
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When my kids have free time I make them read. They can write later, when they've read more of the worthwhile things others have said. I don't believe in this "finding your voice" nonsense. Two ears to listen vs. one mouth to talk.
Neil Postman warned of the impact of screen viewing (he was going after TV at the time) in his 1985 book AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH. In it he demonstrated that brain chemistry is actually altered when we favor image watching over reading, and that our capacity to reason was atrophying as a result. Then in 2010 Nicholas Carr wrote THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS, underlining Postman's concern with another 20 years of research. Combine the shrinkage of the reasoning part of the brain with the postmodern assault on Reason and its promotion of Emotion in its place and you have the hideous mess that passes for political dialogue in this country.
http://techliberation.com/2010/06/01/book-review-nicholas-carr%E2%80%99s-the-shallows/
The senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's School of Education and Lifelong Learning...
Another "problem" discovered by some Ed School apparatchik.
Oddly enough, from the same university that hatched the global warming hysteria.
When I worked for the IRS, I had a 10 minute walk to my commute.
Never regretted it.
Never regretted it.
I'll assume you refer to the walk.
No, I appreciated the money, too.
Speaking for the Borg, We find this a bad idea. Don't listen.
At least Orwell was wrong. Credit Insty
I strongly believe that idle hands are the devil's workshop.
Because once I finally had explained to me what that phrase means I thought, "Yeah." So children should be given clay and scissors and paper and glue and such things as to keep their hands busy. And books they can trash to lead the way.
A children's origami book and a pack of origami paper can keep children occupied for weeks all by themselves. That's why that very odd discipline was invented in the first place.
Did you imagine old time Japanese had an excess of thin paper, perfectly square and brightly colored on one side?
The parents said, "To be lucky, we need exactly 1,000 paper cranes strung together hanging from this coathanger." And the kids all went, "What?"
And then later, "Oh wait, I made a mistake, that was 10,000 paper cranes to be lucky."
And along the way the children became bored with that and moved on to other things and thought up their own games and other things to do.
Or else stayed stuck on origami and persisted with that through the years until they began treating each scale of a fish as an individual origami square within a matrix of like squares, or circles within squares, and created outrageously complex models that only a fiend would think of attempting and leading to such extreme paper folding of fantasy creatures and for no good reason at all.
Except to brag.
Or maybe just see. Which shows that it turns out that busy hands are devilish too.
How about everyone, indeed.
In my experience "stand and stare time" is unavoidable. Whether good or bad, who doesn't spend much of his life Waiting For Godot?
Boredom begets creativity.
Boredom begets creativity.
I started getting a little more creative in my spare time because TV got so damned lame. I turn it on, but just to light room. Flat screen HD TV gives the best light.
I turned off the lap top for about 7 hours today and read a book - 'Unbroken' by Laura Hillenbrand(of 'Seabiscuit' fame) and feel better for doing it.
Now while it's not 'stand and stare' time it was down time away from whatever a computer is; besides I'm old enough to have already spent waaaaay too much time at internal reflection.
('Unbroken' is excellent! Go read it)
They don't do that if you don't give them those things.
What about those of us who turn on a screen to read a book. Or right now, a blog. Or use a screen to write a creative post on a blog?
:P
Something else a kid might want to do. Can get a stack of those pretty cheaply.
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