IBMC #09 Mooreeffoc: The Be A Baby Challenge

IBMC Challenge Number 09 (Highly recommended)

This is perhaps the most interesting challenge of  IBMC’s repertoire of tasks. I suggest everyone give this a shot…

As a baby everything around is new to them. They slowly learn things by keenly observing how each and everything is done. It’s a pleasure to watch a baby learn new things. They learn that they need to cry to get something. They learn that they need to put forward their hands to reach out for something. Many such slow incremental things accumulate in order.

Now the task is if you were to see something with a fresh new perspective, what would it be? Give a baby step to something and explore this new perception and dimension with your engaging thoughts. You can give a fresh meaning to a new word, sentence, concept or anything weird or meaningful.

 

 

 

The word comes originally from Charles Dickens, who used it in his abandoned autobiography. He was sitting in a London cafe one day and noticed that “Moor-eeffoc” is “coffee room” spelled backwards; Dickens was looking at the establishment’s name from the “wrong” side of the window. G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien later used “mooreeffoc” in print to mean something suddenly seen in a strangely new way. (You might say that David Lynch films are full of mooreeffoc places, objects, and people.)

 

The idea of  incremental albeit continuous good change is followed by the Japanese, they call it Kai (good) Zen (change). It was coined in the book of the same name written by author Masaaki Imai.

If I could actively seek out something to see in a fresh new perspective it would be school and the joy of learning. My experience with school is like a complex number: it takes effort to get to the root of it as it is negative. I have to “Imagine” a way to get to the bottom of the problem but the solution eludes me like an axis tantalizingly out of reach of an asymptote.  (a joke in poor taste?)

As far as education is concerned school provides the necessary tools to extract information and refine it. After all, questions are typically modeled in adherence to bloom’s taxonomy.

This type of Higher. Order. Thinking (HOT) sharpens the mind in such a manner that people are more ready to cope with novel situations that their textbook does not give them a go-to answer for. Think about it really, if all you had to do to be successful in life was follow a textbook without question, wouldn’t you really be the best you could be already?

^ inherited wealth (donald trump)… or people who have inherited the wisdom of their forefathers without ever being formally taught(inherited knowledge)

 

It doesn’t do to only have a great plan, execution of the idea or the presentation of the information is what might make all the difference.

For the longest time now I’ve viewed the joy of learning as deriving a sense of satisfaction from getting the socially acceptable test score. What happens when one tests poorly? Condescension from peers obviously!  Unfortunately as of late, that doesn’t seem to cut it. My motivation appears to stem from wanting to gain deeper understanding of how things work. During my years at school… esp. (year 8-11), I was routinely shut down by teachers whenever I asked more than one question. Retrospectively this made the process of learning a painstaking as well as arduous process. If I asked for alternatives to tried and true methods, none were offered…

Recently I came across the types of learning such as but not limited to these:

It is not fair to blame the teachers as they have 40 minutes to achieve the complicated task of teaching a classroom of children that each have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as individual learning style, though I would have appreciated it if they didn’t teach to tests and instead explained each subject in a broad scope so individual’s could perform well on tests anyway as they have the requisite skill set to analytically approach the questions and subject matter instead of just a particular range of predetermined questions.

What I’ve learned is that learning is a lifelong process and I need to proactively seek out what works best for me. As of this moment, listening to Claudio Monteverdi’s music while sipping a cup of tea and reading condensed notes which I elaborate or annotate is what works best for me. Failing to do that, listening to an interactive lecture works wonders as well.