“Human Beings Are So Made That The Ones Who Do The Crushing Feel Nothing; It Is The Person Crushed

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

Sometimes I feel like I am in a bathtub filling up faster than I can drain it. And lately, the drain is clogged and I am drowning and drowning and drowning.

I am losing air faster than I can handle; killing me slowly, suffocating me with black spots filtering over my eyes, decorating my room’s walls.

It’s a strange sensation, that of time running out. Who chained me to the bottom of this bathtub in the first place? Who is turning on the water, was it me?

I am the hand of ruin; the catalyst to my own destruction. Salvation seems beyond reason and unfathomable beneath the water.

Writing was my drain.

It breathes fire into my lungs and ice into veins. It’s the only time I feel in control, powerful… alive.

Now, the doubt, guilt and shame ties me to the silence. It weighs me down and binds my hands below. I don’t think I can tell which way is up anymore.

Words are losing meaning and the space between them is an abyss.

I am told to have hope. To write of the sun after rainy days. But what do you write about when the sun burns you charred and the rain soaks you to the bone?

God, I need five more minutes of peace.

I know it’s too much to ask, I haven’t been your favorite for years.

I am drowning, lost and fearful.

My heart has turned to solid as my body sinks further. Is floating up even worth it at this point? Or should I let the darkness continue its course? After all, who am I but a hollow vessel to tell it to stop.

“Nobody knows as yet what is normal. We only know what is customary.”

- Dr. Harry Benjamin

Spoiler alert: there IS no “normal.” There is: common, typical, etc. Normal is a judgment and a social control mechanism. 

Rough Scribbles for a painting. Hopefully I can start this weekend. #graffiti #painting #canvas #bird #kingfisher #wings #flying #feathers

Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it.

The War Boys (2009)

I found this on Pinterest and am crying for some reason-

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (via philosophybits)

“I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.”

—

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.

- Jean Piaget 1896-1980

How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.

One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.

As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?

Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.

Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”

Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.

Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.

Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.

Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.

This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.

At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.

We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.

For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.