This post is written as part of my homework for the MIT Media Lab's MOOC, "Learning Creative Learning." For this assignment, we were asked to write a response to the essay,"The Gears of My Childhood," by Seymour Papert. It was the foreword to his 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, which I keep hearing great things about.
When I
think back to the prime intellectual and educational influences on my
childhood, I come up with two things: reading and painting D&D
figurines.
For
whatever reason, my parents didn’t have a working TV in our house
until I was 10 years old. This meant that my brother and I had to
figure out other ways of occupying ourselves in all the odd little
intervals during which our peers would have watched a TV show. We had
our outlets—my best friend who lived right down the street was from
a TV-centric family. I don’t even think they had a dining room
table, as it would have been unnecessary for them. They had TV dinner
tables. But because of the age difference between my brother and I
(six years), we had different ideas about the best way to spend our
time. Most often, we both chose reading. Looking back at my 5-10
year-old self, I would probably say that I was a prodigious reader.
Thanks to the fact that I had nothing else to do, and parents who
were readers themselves, and who didn’t feel the need to tell me
what I should be reading, I read widely and curiously. I lost myself
in books on a daily basis. I remember existing fully in the worlds
that I read, losing hours to be with the Five Children and It, or
searching for the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, or wandering with Taran.
Being called to dinner five times because I just didn’t hear my mom
calling me against the pull of a great story.
I suppose
that this taught me a thing or two about imagination, about what it
means to be invested in a story. It taught me to not be afraid of
books, for sure. I still love books, and easily could spend hours in
both libraries and bookstores—my wife and children usually have to
drag me out of both places. It taught me that just sitting around
reading is a great way to spend my time, and that one can almost
always gain something from that pursuit. I also learned how
to sit for hours on end reading a book, which came in very, very
handy when I was in college and grad school, and still occasionally
comes in handy when I have a stack of papers to grade.
When
I was eight or so, my brother and his best friend discovered Dungeons
and Dragons. As they started to play, they started to collect the
little, lead figurines that made imagining one’s placement on a
dungeon map more manageable. My brother and I both started to collect
the figurines, and along with that came the process of painting their
dull, gray skins with more lifelike colors. Because the average
height of these armored warriors, mages, trolls, and skeletons was
about two inches, this meant manipulating tiny brushes and many
different colors of paints, both acrylyc and oil-based. The attention
to detail necessary, as well as the planning needed to figure out how
you wanted a character to look, gave me an appreciation of really
trying to do something well because I
wanted it to come out well. My parents didn’t care, though they
gave praise when I painted a nice one. My brother was pretty wrapped
up in his own painting, but not so much that he wouldn’t point out
places I’d messed up. Those tiny, fantastical figures pushed my
little fingers’ coordination past their capabilities, but my
failures to pant accurately never made me want to quit, and they made
the successes stand out like beacons, leading me to more complex and
intricate ideas for the next figurine.
So,
in short, the lessons I learned from the big influences in my
childhood were to sit still, lose yourself in a story, and pay
attention to detail. Not bad, in the long run.
