The eggducation of hatchlings

Yesterday after church, as we made our ritual stop at Trader Joes, Andy decided to run into the learning supplies store next door to look for math manipulatives. Unfortunately, they really didn't have much that looked terribly useful for his purposes---instead of explicating math concepts in interesting and engaging ways, these products attempted to mask the fact that this is math class with utterly irrelevant "exciting" elements that have absolutely nothing to do with the concepts at hand. Like the pen that "motivates students with flashing lights!" Most of the items displayed seemed as though they would be quite effective in teaching children that math is boring in itself, and needs a heavy dose of "interesting" stuff to make it palatable. Perhaps I should ask my mother to dig out the wonderful math games from my childhood... The fun stuff is intrinsic to math, not extrinsic. Numbers actually are much more interesting than flashing lights--even to a third grader, as long as they are properly understood--but you'd never know that from looking at these educational tools.

But I digress. While we were in the store, we looked various educational toys for pickles of the small variety. They had a lovely little play area, in which the wuggies sat upon little pint-sized stuffed chairs, grabbed a toy train from a little boy, played with a different toy train, grabbed toy trains out of each others hands, and played with the eggs. It was one of those toys consisting of a row of small characters which pop up when you push the button, flip the appropriate switch, or whatever. In most such toys, the characters are hidden under a flap door, but in this case, they were concealed inside an egg. When you push the button, the creature "hatches." I thought it was immensely cute, and contemplated getting it for a Christmas present. However, the boys found it interesting... but no more interesting than the massive quantity of toys that already covers our living room floor.

What to get the boys for Christmas? They like the noisy toys---the little "piano," the talking lizard, and the pajama-clad "Prayer Bear" that recites "Now I lay me down to sleep." And they especially like taking canned goods out of the pantry. But what they really get the biggest kick out of is just anything new. They spend their days going doopah-doopah all over the place, in search of new experiences.

I always thought of the day-after-Christmas-boredom phenomenon as something pernicious, a sign of ingratitude and discontent. Certainly we ought to learn to appreciate what we do have, instead of always wanting more, more, more. Yet can we really be surprised, or upset even, that the much desired sparkly toys lose their charm once obtained? A child's task is to learn, learn, learn, and he pursues that task with vigour. He must see the world in different, new ways, he must add new experiences to his perception of the world. Toys are generally designed to give a child wonderful new experiences, which, by definition, cease to be new rather quickly.

Perhaps the toys which would be most conducive to fun would be those which encourage them to explore deep, rather than wide, enabling them to see different elements of the things that already surround them, rather than just showing them new stuff. As in math, the best sort of fun is intrinsic to the structure of the world, not extrinsic.

At Trader Joes, they gave the boys a perfectly marvelous educational toy--a helium balloon. They were utterly enthralled. This strange red globe contradicted everything they had figured out about gravity. They spent the afternoon conferring together, trying to expand their theory to account for this new phenomenon.

Of course, even a balloon loses its charm after a while, not to mention its helium, and so late last night they found something else to get into.And thus it came about that we found the kitchen floor covered in eggs.