The sound of children thinking
We drag her out of the house for a quick walk in the bush before lunch.
It’s not long before we get to the first bridge. “Let’s count them,” she says. “I need a twig to keep track.” And we’re made to stop and stoop. She wants a particular kind of twig - small and thin enough so she can hold many; not so small that they’ll drop out of her hand. These are hard to find.
That’s the pattern for the whole walk. She adds counting people - that’s my job - and counting seats - Mum’s job. And so, our walk changes from a quick one to a slow, twig-spotting, counting one.
5 bridges
17 people
3 seats.
25 just-right twigs. Numerous not-quite-right ones discarded.
The point here is not about learning to count. She’s 10. Instead, consider the opportunity she created to look closely at the world around her, to classify, to be selective, and do all this for a particular purpose.
Are these things the physical embodiment of the sounds of her thinking?1
If we’d pushed on, ignored her, and emphasised ‘quick’ (really hard not to at times!), her opportunity to think would have been lost. If we’d pushed on, ignored her, and emphasised ‘quick’ (yep, there were moments when that word came out of my mouth), she would have been present but not included.
We’re almost back at the car. “What are you going to do with the sticks?” I ask.
“I’m going to take them back with me, write them on my hand, so I can tell Albert we saw 5 bridges, 17 people, and 3 seats.”
I like that. Thanks to her, the whole point of the walk became attention, inclusion, and connection. Not speed.
I came across this lovely phrase of Vivian Paley’s - “the sounds of children thinking” - in the book Learning Stories in Practice. I highly recommend Paley’s book Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays.