Overcoming Inertia: An Illustration

1/23/2010

Why spiritual children of ANY age have a very hard time overcoming the inertia of “what they always believed” and “this is how we’ve always done it.”

As Jesus said, the children of any calendar age resort to “The old is better, the old is better” when a challenge to their comfort and self-life or ego come along.

But, “not so with you”? : )

You DO realize that if one will not Change, then they can never have more of Jesus than they have had in the past, right? : ) Being “safe” will generally only ever be a CLC or CEC (Career-Limiting and Career-Ending Caper!) in your life, or anyone’s.

Einstein and many others, Believers and unBelievers, have all made this point very clear.

Hi,

This is something from a math book that i read recently that i found to have application beyond “math”. : ) Thought it was helpful and wanted to pass it along…

…If you’ve never explored the ratio between your height and your head, there is no reason to assume you have learned that relationship. You need to do the measurement to find out the ratio. To learn concepts, experience in the real world is needed.

Height/Circumference

Imagine a soft drink can. Suppose you take a piece of yarn and wrap it around the can to measure its circumference. Do you think the circumference is longer, shorter, or about the same as the height of the can?

As with the previous experience, many people guess incorrectly. The common misperception is that the yarn will be about the same length as the height of the can. There’s an element of surprise when that perception is proved to be incorrect. More than surprise, there is often a feeling consternation, of being puzzled about what has been shown, often of uncomfortableness. It’s as if you thought you had more understanding about the relationship between height and circumference of a soft drink can.

The realization of a misperception produces mental confusion. You now have a problem—you have been faced with a contradiction. This state of confusion is what Piaget calls disequilibrium. At this moment you have the greatest potential to learn, to gain new understanding about a relationship. To develop the understanding that takes you beyond your misperception to what really is so requires that you reorganize your mental construct (in this instance, about the relationship between the circumference and height of a soft drink can) that led you to the erroneous conclusion in the first place.

Only you can accomplish this reorganization, in your own mind. The source of this understanding is inside you. Then, when you come to new understanding—based in reality rather than how you perceive reality—you no longer are confused. You are in what Piaget terms the state of equilibrium. Your intellectual balance is restored, and you no longer experience discomfort and confusion.

To follow up the experiment of measuring the soft drink can, you would benefit from additional experiences with cylinders that had different proportions. One experience is not generally sufficient to cement understanding of a relationship that is new to a learner.

The process of resolving disequilibrium is called equilibration. This process is benefited by ample concrete experience by the learner. It’s generally not sufficient to be taught a concept abstractly. Actually, when you study geometry in high school, you probably were “taught” this concept. You were taught that the circumference of a circle is equal to pi times the diameter. (c = πd or c = 2πr) and that pi is equal to 3 1/7 or 3.14. You may have learned the formula and also may have been successful applying it in textbook situations. But you did not learn about the formula or about pi in a way that made it accessible for you to apply in a new situation; that is, that the circumference is about three times the diameter and that using this information enables you to make better estimates in measurement situations.

For many people, there is little relationship between the abstractions of mathematics and the concepts those abstractions represent. The mathematics instruction we provide to children should emphasize meaning, relationships, and connections, and we should be mindful of what our students understand, not merely what they can do. There’s an old joke about a used-car salesman who reported to his boss: “I sold the car, but the customer didn’t buy it.” It’s not enough to teach without careful attention to what is learned.

Learning often begins with the recognition of a problem. The process of equilibration is one in which there is continuous interaction between your mental conceptual structures and your environment. It’s a repeated cycle of going from confusion to new understanding. Confusion is essential to the process. Yet in school, confusion is often seen negatively, as a hindrance, rather than an opportunity for learning. It’s as if the goal for a child is to be right all the time, to complete papers correctly, to be successful continually. This makes no sense when the process of learning implies that some concepts have not yet been learned.