- I'm proud of this.
- I love this.
- I didn't know I was doing that!
Love of the topic is extremely effective in teaching. Ted loves chapjae, and his roommate loves food (I suspect ;), and it sounds like the communication of this cooking skill was received on both ends with enthusiasm. Rachel loves to knit, and that made it a much more natural (Mother Tongue?) flow of information, even as I attempted to tie myself up with the yarn. Even in the academic institutions of the world, I have found that teachers that love their subjects brighten my day and are easier to learn from.
The best examples of folk knowledge--as well as the most effective transmission of it--all fall in the third category. Jared found himself accidentally teaching a his nephews one of his favorite pastimes: baseball. No artificial efforts had to be put into it, it wasn't 'just a hobby'--it was real life in action. The kids lapped it up, and the uncle just uncled along. I think it's fair to say he was teaching a lot more than baseball, too: his mannerisms, his patience, his enthusiasm, and his culture were all available for young sponges to lap up.
My Humble Opinion
The first form can build acquaintances, the second friendships, and the third families. This is why I think the Mother Tongue persists in spite of "Father"ly disdain. This is why English developed and stuck in spite of invasion after invasion--the foundations of the society were cast in it by the mothers and others that passed knowledge. (Man! Poking around about the history of English on Wikipedia alone makes my head spin... I liked this chart and this fairly concise and readable history. Beowulf is also a fascinating study from the dawn of English.)
What have you noticed about how you teach or learn 'the little things,' or more generally, 'folk knowledge?'
Brigham Young once said: "You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation." I suppose he's stating what we're finding out as well, which is: The mother tongue teaches us through love and unity; The father tongue teaches us because of obligation or selfish reasons.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child, I think I learned folk knowledge out of just lack of exposure to other worlds and people. Now, I learn folk knowledge to understand my place in society and how I can be more accepted by others. . .more united.
In teaching folk knowledge, it feels good to have that feeling of unity with whomever I'm with. It feels great knowing that at least for that one moment we are connected somehow. It worked pretty well as a missionary. When you ask people to explain things (language, culture, maps, etc.) to you, they get the opportunity to share their own knowledge in a very natural and maternal way. I suppose that's why teachers always ask for comments. . .to tear down the invisible wall between the teacher and the student so that mother tongue is used, not the father tongue. Once the mother tongue is used, unification happens.
so i think of the father tongue as being a mutation of the mother tongue - sort of a prideful corruption thereof. (which is interesting to think that the mother 'matter'/Eve was created from the father 'pattern'/Adam)
ReplyDeletein addition to this, i might suggest that there is a fourth category, which may or may not be an offshoot of the third category - "i love YOU, so i teach you what i know." if we added father tongue to the top of the list, and this new category to the bottom, i feel like we've effectively captured the range of father and mother tongues, using the transmission of folk knowledge as our units of measurement. Thinking of this, in correlation to brother nibley's view of knowledge and how it is transferred, i believe he would say that the world strives to push the upper boundaries of the scale - uniforms at schools, fancy titles on the names of those teaching, big scary-impressive stone buildings to reinforce the authority of the messages taught within and the lack of knowledge of the learner - while the right way is to seek learning as far on the bottom of this dichotomy as possible - pure/virtuous/godly/repentant learning with the attitude of reverence for the knowledge given to us and a desire to share that knowledge so that those around us are edified together (d&c 88:122)
so by this do i mean that I'm better than Jon because i was further down the list. no, not at all. i wanted very much to teach someone how to make snares, and I'm not gonna lie, the reasons for doing so were mostly prideful - "I'm proud of this, so I'll share it" kind of knowledge.
i dunno, what do you think of the mother/father tongue scale?
@Jared: you certainly ended up lower on this page than I did. :)
ReplyDelete(Irony of this comment's placement not missed)
It hadn't even occurred to me that the father tongue would even be related to this scale (I saw it as orthogonal)! Curious. I kinda like the new scale. Rather than an enumeration and characterization of the preceding posts it synthesizes and predicts a continuum among folk knowledge.
Anyhow, I think that "I'm proud of this, I want to share it" is an odd mix of the two tongues. The pride is reminiscent of the father tongue, while the sharing is definitely a mother tongue characteristic.