Conversations with the Floor
Education has always been 'life long', it just depends when you start ...

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December 19, 1998.  Letter to a friend  

Today a friend/mother/acquaintance saw our son (17 months) standing around and garbling out long strings of comments, eye contact, phrasing pauses, etc. and commented how young he was to be 'speaking' so well .. her kids didn't do that until a year or more older, and she found his abilities/behavior extraordinary.  

Well, in our family we take it for granted that if you don't goo-goo ga-ga a human infant during these early months, you get back what you expose them to ... including and especially human language. Most adults don't recognize this when they raise their kids, soooo, my brain's been buzzing with how to write this up and spread the word.

I've decided to write you a piece entitled "Conversations with the Floor, aka, 'How to participate with evolution'. Learning language and communication is just like learning to walk.  Exactly like it.  Every time an infant moves its body, exploring what's possible in regard to motion in the world, it encounters a ground of some sort. In growth, it learns how and what to do in relation with the constancy of the generally flat smooth surfaces that are pressed against, interacted with, and call for certain motion behaviors in return, in that solid firmness underneath its body. Language is the same thing, really.  Just as the body 'communicates' with the ground, the mind/hearing/mouth/facial cues/clues it receives (and can return) communicate the constancy - dependableness - of signal interactions and forms done with other creatures ... parents, humans of all descriptions.

Painstaking practice of crawling, toddling, walking, running is mirrored in establishing and building language skills. If the ground were totally irregular, if it was solid and consistant one day but presented differently the next, with no relevance from one combination of interactions to the next ... that's tantamount to throwing gibberish sounds and inconsistent behaviors at infants. It puts off exposing the mind to associations it's ready to perceive even from birth.

So, if our bodies have 'conversations' with the ground, and we learn to ambulate and walk because of the clarity and consistency of signals the earth, the floor, communcate back to us, why should parents and educators be surpised that equally early language skills are possible when the verbal/mental/sentient 'communication environ- ment' is clear and consistent from the outset too.

If my baby looks at me and comes out with a string of sounds, conveying that she has a concept in mind that she's trying to communicate in way's she has seen me do to her, it doesn't matter if I comprehend exactly what's in
her thoughts or not. What is crucial is that I respond to her with the outward appropriate behavior that tells her that what she's trying - that communication technique - is the right one to use. And so I give an appropriate pause - to consider her words - then smile or frown or shake my head or acknowledge "something" and speak a responsive sentence ... maybe even imitating one of her words. And, if I can be aware of what her activities or situation might involve, I try to figure out exactly what her concern really is ... like finding her misplaced drinking bottle or cuddle toy or car or book, then I can really be involved with the whole spectrum of my child's communication abilities in a very practical and supportive early way.

And, in the long run, if enough people perform these supports and exchanges over and over again with their children and students, whole societies will develop with new and earlier abilities, skills adaptative with a new  appreciation for true human potential. New abilities will emerge, new mental-body skills, sufficient to even permit the creation/arising of new species lines of sapiens sapiensis globalis.

Dec 1998

 

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