Is it blue?

I was in Salem last month, as I noted a few posts ago, checking out the House of the Seven Gables and various witchcraft-related sites.  At the end of the day, sitting at the station waiting for the train back to Boston, the talk between a mother and her young daughter sitting next to me kept me entertained.

The little girl was two years old, three at the most.  Like most kids that age, she was more than keeping up her end of the conversation.  She was asking Mom about colors.  "Is this blue?  What about this, Mama?  But is this blue, too?"  

The mother patiently answered all the questions.  "Yes, that's blue. No, that looks kind  of blue but it's really purple.  That's right, the sky is blue today."

I admired the woman's patience.  Myself being the sort of guy who very soon would have told my little girl that Daddy's had a hard day and needs a little alone time, so why don't you go play on the track?  (Oh, not really, but you know what I mean.)

Then I began thinking about the girl's questions.  Color isn't all that easy a concept for a child's brain to grasp, even though her eyes come with the ability to distinguish between colors.  When Mom tells little Betty that something is "blue," what is she talking about?  Is she talking about shape or size or the object's use?  The child has to keep asking if various things are blue in order to figure out what they all have in common.  The sky is blue, her jeans are blue, Mama's necklace is blue.  Sooner or later, she realizes why these disparate items are all called "blue."

Suppose you're a teacher explaining color to a group of intelligent kids who, for some reason, have never learned the concept of color.  How do you even begin to tell them what they're supposed to be looking for?  You can do it only by showing them objects that have the same color, contrasting those items with other objects of a different color, and hoping the kids catch on.

Even then, how do you explain which color is "blue"?  Once learned, the difference between the various shades of blue and, say, orange seems intuitively obvious.  But it really isn't.  A scientist can give an objective definition of "blue" as light with a wavelength between about 4,500 and 4,900 angstroms.  That doesn't help a child.  Again, once they understand "color," you teach them by contrasting blue objects with non-blue objects.  Just as the mother in Salem was doing with her daughter.

Somehow, virtually all of us learn colors, regardless of how skillful, or not, our parenting may have been.  But I recall even in first grade working on numerous exercises where we colored objects blue where the word "blue" was written. We were learning to read the words, of course, but we were also learning (or reinforcing our ability) to differentiate one color from another.

I thought to myself -- in fact I noted on Facebook -- that the little girl was fortunate to have a mother so patient and so involved in her daughter's learning.  Yes, the child no doubt would learn "blue" eventually, even if her mother totally ignored her.  But how much better to learn it from a loving mother when she was two or three, rather than as a novel concept among scornful classmates when she reached kindergarten.

I remember a girl in high school literature class who -- it finally became obvious to everyone -- had no understanding of the concept of "rhyme."  The teacher had been increasingly irritated that she would pick one word to rhyme with another when their sounds had only the vaguest resemblance.  For example, she might have said that "trick" and "track" rhyme.  Or "paper" and "pavement."   I doubt that the girl -- not the sharpest blade in the drawer, admittedly -- had an organic inability to detect whether two words rhymed.  It was just something she had never thought about, and that no one had ever explained to her.

The concept of rhyming poetry itself was probably a complete novelty to her.  Our tenth grade teacher wasn't inclined to start from scratch with the poor girl.  The teacher just more or less threw up her hands and began talking to someone else.

School teachers are (or can be)  great, but parents are their kids' first and best teachers.  Few children in school will ever find a teacher who can offer them the time and attention that a parent will.  Kids whose curiosity has been ignored or throttled before starting school may find themselves at a disadvantage that they are never able to overcome.