Logging - groom the journalist in your kid

We recently paid a visit to this new swanky mall that has come up near our place and also watched the movie "The Heart of the Sea" which is based on the book "Moby-dick".
Set in early 1800s, this movie is about one of those dangerous expeditions to the deep pacific oceans in search of whale oil. The crew eventually faces a wreck and the rest of the movie is about their survival.

Ok, the reason why I explain all this is due to this one interesting behaviour that caught my attention in the movie. The ship journey lasts more than few hundred days, and in all these days the Captain of the ship is shown logging his daily activities in a diary.He logs every detail of the expedition.

This made me realise how good are these guys ( it was an american ship ) in recording and logging their activities as early as in the 1800s. Logging or recording our experiences/learnings is an important part of our evolution. Human memory has its limits and you cannot recall every detail you encountered a few days ago. So your logs will serve as an important reference to you and perhaps to your successors.

I think we lack this behaviour by and large in our society. There are many stories around this fact , that the ancient Indian civilizations were very advanced in science,mathematics and religion , but since they were not recorded, many of it was lost. Perhaps this lack of discipline is inherited for a long time.

And So, I urge all parents to inculcate the habit of logging in your kids. Buy them diaries, journals, scrap books etc and ask them to record their daily experiences. Make sure these journals are not thrown away after use. These are important artifacts of your child's evolution. You can use one of the many only blogging tools for recording your child's journey.

This habit will help them in several ways :

1. Recollect their days' experiences and put things in perspective.
2. Help them review their learnings periodically
3. In future, this habit will help them in being very successful in their careers.
4. Finally, writing reinforces their learnings.

Perseverance Pays

Today morning, my blood pressure levels went up substantially high. The reason - I was trying to teach my elder daughter (she is 6) how to play snow bowling using the Nintendo Wii remote.     The seemingly simple act of holding up the remote + pressing the B Button + swinging your arm with the button pressed + releasing the Button after the swing , seemed way to complicated to my daughter. She kept trying repeatedly, but will either release the button way too early or not release it at all. It was funny at times to see the ball go hit the audience and audience booing at it. But after a point, I got a bit agitated.  With the pressure levels shooting up higher, I lost my patience and even showed my anger to her. After a while, we stopped playing and took to our other routines.

Later when I was thinking about it, I realised my mistake. After all, what seems simple to us might be quite difficult for kids. We need to give them time to learn new things. I also recalled similar situations when we taught her a lot of things - riding a electric bike , scooter board, making her remain in water without breathing, coloring - I could go on and on. During all these events, she was struggling initially and latched on to it beautifully over a period of time. Thats when I realised that perseverance pays. Lot of parents give up on certain things when they find that the child is not picking it up. Give the kids their time. They will take time initially but will certainly acquire the skill. I am sure my daughter is going to defeat me in Wii Snow bowling soon.

A beautiful mind!

Welcome all to Jai's joint. This is my second attempt to get blogging(needless to mention, my first one turned into an futile exercise) and I hope to make this one a continuous journey as long as I could. A journey that would reflect my life's experiences and learning. A journey that would strive to make a positive impact in the lives of the people who pass by this joint.

Enough for an introduction and lets get to the topic. Through my first blog, I wanted to share an important thought that dawned upon me last week. Its nothing great but a simple Back to the Basics stuff that I realized and thought will share.

I was going through this online video tutorial last week on a certain Networking topic.At the end of the tutorial, I felt immensely satisfied and happy that I have learnt a supposedly complex topic with relative ease and a thorough understanding. When I did some introspection on how the author of this presentation managed to get across the technology so easily, I found out that he has actually answered a few basic questions on the technology. Suppose that the topic I was learning was MPLS technology, the author had tried to answer few questions:

1. What is MPLS technology?
2. Why it was introduced or why it came to practice?
3. When and where was it introduced?
4. How to implement this technology?

and by knowing the answers to these simple questions, I realized that I have gained a profound knowledge on this topic.

Hence, I concluded that any complex thing in this world can be learnt or mastered by answering these simple questions or put in a different way, to learn new things, you should try and ask these questions and get answers - the What, Why, When, Where and How?
In fact i think that the five basic subjects that are taught in our schools are nothing but the answers to these simple questions. Lets try to map them:

• English/Language I = What?
• Language II - Again What?
• Maths - How?
• Science - Why?
• Social Studies(History&Geography) - When and Where?

In conclusion, lets try to encourage asking these questions on any things we are interested. Lets teach our kids that to have an exploring mind, they should ask these questions on anything and everything they stumble upon.