Jispa gets it right an amazing number of times. I do get the
feeling that just because she is my daughter I must be seeing her in shining
light. I am sure other kids are also equally smart. But then I look around the
office. I see so many whackos in office who would not get it the way Jispa gets
it. I am talking about abstract concepts and the ability to live with it and
allow the opposites to reconcile in the mind. So you have to allow the brain to
ask questions, be happy with the fuzzy nature of logic and somehow manage with
it, reconcile it and even expand on it. She got inflation concepts, money
supply concepts and other general economic concepts bang on. She manages it well within her brain.
These days its history that she is pretty excited about. She
has just started learning history and they have started teaching about the pre
historic Stone Age era. Many years ago I had accidently been in touch with the Dead
Famous series of books. They were basically biographies of famous people very
well written and were funny to read. They
were in mixed format with fun facts, interspersed with simple lucid writing and
a lot of cartoons thrown in. They cracked a whole host of jokes at the expense
of the personality in question as well as the history teacher. A delight to
read.
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After that I bought a whole host of such books in the series – horrible histories, dead famous, murderous math etc. Of these one was on Stone Age. Jispa had read that and it fit nicely in her brain. She did really well and she answered a lot of questions.
In fact there were so many answers from her that her teacher
suspected that she had the notes of the earlier batch. So today I got her to
take the book to school to explain to her teacher that we are the irritating
parents who driven enough to take the notes in advance and start teaching their
kids to win early. But I felt good. The choice Jasmine and I made early on was
to surround Jispa with books. Lots of books. We werent earning too much we
decided that we will never have a budget limitation for books. We have budgeted
on so many items. We have cut back on many but we have never ever lost the plot
on books. Jispa was always free to buy whichever books she chose. Never any
limitation.
Then she told me about a question she asked her teacher. She
was scared of asking the teacher as the teacher is known to shoot down
questions on a bad mood day. She was learning about this statue and how we believe
that it is of the mother goddess.
She asked how we can be so sure this was a Goddess that was
being worshiped Good question was her teacher’s reaction. Her teacher said that
we are around 90% sure that it’s a goddess but can never know for sure. Then I explained
to Jispa that do understand that we are only 90% sure, that means there is a
10% chance that we are not sure and that we are wrong. History and especially
prehistoric period is a difficult subject to understand. You never know what
the truth is. It’s just this story seems to all add up but so can something
else. After the conversation Jispa just summarized beautifully, she said – it’s
just that in this story all the pieces fit well, but there can be another story
in reality where also all the pieces fit , so we are never sure, it’s just one
way of looking it. I was pretty stunned. That’s a lot of maturity for a ten
year old. Many adults I know will fight on versions of history and believe
whatever is told to them to be true – just because a text book, or worse still –
a newspaper said so. But she understood that well. I was surprised, I asked her
if that was her understanding or was it taught to her. It was her own
understanding all right.
Then we branched off talking about probabilities and that
life is all about probabilities. I explained about the coin toss. The chance of
a coin landing on heads is 50% and that after 5 consecutive tosses of heads the
probability of the 6 toss is also a 50% of heads. That’s probability for you
but after let’s say 7 consecutive heads you seem to be better off betting tails
thanks to mean revertal. How long can you have a streak that beats the average,
even though you know that every individual coin toss is an independent event? We
can’t predict any single toss but we know that over the long run things always
average out… I dint bother to check if she really got that. If she did and if I
do talk to her later about it and she gives it back, then I will let you know. That
(is her teachers words) is too advanced :)
here is one extract of the book. Highly recommended as gifts as well.
