Yesterday Carol and I had a three-hour session at RFB&D reading from a psychology textbook.  It was a revealing experience for me.  My background is in social psychology as well as history but I didn’t know beans about the subject that I taught only once to undergraduates.

We read about Jean Piaget who was just being recognized for his contributions to understanding early childhood when I taught that class.  I was woefully unprepared to teach a tough no nonsense group of older nursing students Intro to Psych.  I did little preparation for I thought I could breeze through it.  Mr. Piaget was little understood at that time but he made a lot of sense with our detailed reading yesterday of his ideas AND their updating by researchers who followed him.

I found his study of his own children fascinating.  He began with what he knew best.  Starting with what you know best is recommended for all storytellers.  As with all personal accounts, his did not go much beyond basics and his whole system of thought centered on these few significant observations.  He started on a path and did not stray far from it and for many years, everyone followed it.

I bring this up because I realized my limitations when I taught that class. I was unable to do anything about it and muddled through cheating my students.  My path was my experience with my own marriage and care for my sons.  I was severely limited to what I personally experienced and ignored the text that was sketchy but far better organized than I was.  The text was mired in Freud and Watson.  What I missed was an opportunity to use my students as a resource.

This section of Intro was designed for education students but it happened to be filled with older nursing candidates.  They were mostly married or single mothers and had a wealth of personal experience with direct observation of early childhood.  I unfortunately did not take advantage of this experience.  I now know I bungled and was a terrible teacher who let them down.  In retrospect (and I have been thinking about this a great deal and pushed to further analysis after reading the lucid account of Piagetian thought yesterday) I thought of the perfect teaching tool.

“Remember when your child responded to attention? What did the child do?”  In addition, “Remember when they begin to reach out? What kept their attention? Tell about that.” Or, “At what stage did ‘I will take responsibility for holding this bottle, this spoon and so on’?”  I find that we would rather speak out of ignorance than listen.  The wise observation I rarely internalized is that “When all is said and done, more is said than done.”