My granddaughter just brought me a platter of invisible cookies. When I asked her what kind, she beamed: “48 Cookies!” Then she offered to “peel them” for me. Gobbling them down, I proclaimed their tastiness. “I put onions in them, grandma.”
Does this exchange represent the state of a toddler’s mind? Yes. Patti’s nearly three and her precious head spins a golden thread of verbal chaos. I leap as fast as I can to make the connections.
Yet, as a grownup, my thinking works similarly at times. The number “48” drifts in my mind because I just viewed an item costing $48.00 on-line. A friend has posted a yummy recipe for fruit-based marinade. The shrimp need peeling for tonight’s gumbo. And I still need to buy onions. My mind too overflows with streams of irrational associations, yet I am able to censor them from escaping my lips.
As we gear up for the new school year, I am reconsidering my ideas of education in terms of how a toddler’s mind works. After all, each of us as toddlers once possessed such a mind. Years of learning helped us distinguish between random associations and reasonable information. And who helped us in that complex process? The unsung heroes: parents, neighbors, and teachers.
For some reason, musing through the “invisible cookies” has also reminded me of my favorite course I taught at SMU: Intro to Graduate Studies. Despite its homogenized name, it was a well-honed, complex course in music bibliography. As an academic discipline, music bibliography arose within a tidal wave of 19th-century European scholarship (much of it German and Austrian) that reshaped most disciplines, including the arts.
During this wave, enormous scholarly effort was devoted to publishing authoritative editions of masterwork compositions, compiling detailed descriptions of these pieces in what were called “thematic catalogues,” and producing hoards of composer biographies. The name musicology (Musikwissenschaft) was born to describe all of this research.
By the time I took music bibliography as a graduate student in musicology in the 1970s, the magnitude of materials available at the University of North Carolina library was dazzling . . . and daunting. Our professor was German, too, with little sympathy for any kind of laziness or academic weakness. I nearly collapsed.
Yet I was never prouder of anything than the modest grade I received from that year-long course. “Done with that!” I proclaimed with relief. “Never again.” Oops. Not many years later, I was teaching the same course to my own graduate students. And so life goes.
How do I bring all of this back to “invisible cookies”? Well, you know, at Professor Carol, we always strive for connections, even if it’s a stretch! But seriously, perhaps a toddler views world much as I once saw that massive music library. Before me were endless rows of new things with hard names, unfamiliar ideas, and discouraging complexities. Yet I knew I needed to take it on. And some of what I was able to sort out was tasty (invisible cookies) while some of it lay in random, heavy layers, awaiting a sorting process that still took years.
If only we could approach the demands of such adult learning with the energy and humor of a three-year old. Wait, the year is just beginning! Am I already invoking the spectre of being tired?
Well we know that fatigue will come. Summer is a kind of nap that refreshes us, but still requires us to put both feet on the floor and walk again down the hall of learning. No matter how the hall is constructed, the world must be mastered. Order and usefulness needs to overtake our untutored minds. The beauty and symmetry of learning demand to be rolled out, cut, and baked from a dough of virtue, truth, and goodness. Our learning and understanding ultimately will be presented on a platter of our life’s accomplishments. The process starts when we first open our eyes as newborns, and, if we are exceptionally blessed, continues until our last breath.
So, in these last days of summer, let your mind play with humorous associations and joyful discoveries. Store them up, for you will later sort them into useful structures that unquestionably help you and your children to move closer to fulfilling your aspirations. Cookies, anyone?
