Monday, March 7, 2005

Today's Piaget Passage

One among many of the gripping passages from The Origins of Intelligence in Children by J. Piaget, the patron saint of observing and reporting the minutiae of early-childhood development:

Observation 91.--At 0;3 (11) Laurent is pulling toward himself sheets, covers, etc., to suck them (he does this a part of each day since he has learned how to grasp).  When I hold out directly in front of him a  package of tobacco, he grasps it immediately, without looking at his hand.  Same reaction with an eraser.  At 0;3 (12) under the same conditions he grasps my watch chain which is on his left and outside the trajectory of the joining hands.  That evening, same reaction with this chain and with a roll of cardboard.  At 0;3 (13) he immediately grasps a case which I hold out to him.  He does not look at his hands or attempt to join them but at once directs the right hand toward the case.  When he has grasped it, he does not suck, but examines it. (118)

And so the observations go with slight distinctions over the course of several months/pages/stages.  After much of my own accommodating, assimilating (taken together: adapting) and organizing, I've crawled to p. 152, which is as far as we're going for tomorrow morning's session.  Since I'm already feeling infantile over the whole plot, I flipped through the Piaget Primer and found this zany cartoon:

To round out my prep for class, I'm going to catch the last few minutes of Super Nanny.  Some poor brat is battling with his parents over bedtime. "Don't you pinch!"

Posted by Derek Mueller at March 7, 2005 10:50 PM to Unspecified