Yin Yang Kid
My oldest daughter is in fifth grade. She is a beautiful girl, and although she is "girly" enough to wear dresses and nail polish with the occasional set of earrings she is just as content to wear jeans, let her hair go wild, and play outside. She's a strict rule follower, a roller-coaster thrill seeker, a popular shy kid who can sing solos without stage fright, and a wonderful little nerd.
In that same dichotomy of character, she loves watching shows but is almost as content doing homework. I personally remember the satisfaction of earning a good score, but I never enjoyed grinding through late evening lessons with my dad—I just wanted to know it and go to bed. Now I'm perfectly willing to spend the time teaching her for as long as it takes because I know that I wouldn't have had the proper foundation to pursue a difficult degree without his persistence. Unlike me, though, she shows no indication of boredom or burnout.
Master and the Grasshopper
We've had some deep conversations about topics that most of my adult acquaintances don't have the patience to endure: talks about race and love and crime and money and professional leadership; but math and science are still more fun to us both. I learned through my own struggles as a student that nothing sucks more than a teacher moving on before that crucial concept clicks, besides possibly revealing your questions only to be met with the same explanation that you couldn't understand the first time! So I tell stories, draw pictures, use props, pull up research articles, do physical modelling, make comparisons to analogous situations.
I'm probably not the worst teacher on Earth, but I certainly can't take credit when her light bulb goes off. She's just bright (not street smart, but that's humorous fodder for another blog). By any benchmark that I remember from my childhood, she "gets it" quicker than I ever did. She goes on to apply it to homework and tests, too, so it's not fleeting.
What I'm most impressed by is that we're moving from tangible to abstract. Tonight we talked about absolute values, the number line, and subtracting negative numbers. I feel like imaginary and negative space start to wire the mind to understand meta-physical concepts. This excites me because until you can paint abstract shapeless "images" in your mind to realize things that cannot be visibly real to our naked eye (like bits, atoms, causal relationships, logical premise) one cannot successfully internalize good/evil, right/wrong, guilt/conscience, ego/id, yin/yang, zen & Buddhism, atheism/God.
Aside from the abstractions on morality, when you learn to see the negative/the void/the quiet/the opposite as a legitimate thing it allows you to expand beyond dollies and toys and the material, into deeper pleasures: to play chess, to write code, to semanticize web pages via markup, to enjoy art and music and patterns in nature.
Most importantly, it teaches that there is a bond between things that depends on the space shared between them–no matter how opposite those things seem. And when we stop looking at the nothing that we share, we end up seeing the everything/the infinite/the patterns of similarity that join us. It's a phenomenon the mind can scarcely comprehend, but our spirit and soul know to be true.
When we strip back the politics and the safeguards that we've armored ourselves in we can empathize innocently like children, forgive each other when we disagree, seek to help each other instead of take from each other. The dark pulls the light toward the center away from naivete; the light pulls the dark toward the center away from years of encrusted anger; and humanity finds its balance. My child learns her math lesson, and I fortify my life lesson.
Image 1 source: http://virtualnerd.com
Image 2 source: https://www.redbubble.com/people/rachelbernstein/works/25203985-sun-and-moon-yin-yang?p=sticker