Oops! i'm knowledging!

so a really interesting thing happened this weekend. My nephews spent the night at our house Friday night. any of you who know a child probably know that two boys, ages seven and four, will not do well if they are kept in an apartment designed for two people for a long time. this was the case saturday morning. the boys were getting a bit wound up, ashley (my wife) and i decided to take them out and play around a bit outside. on the way out the door i grabbed by baseball gloves and a ball on the off chance they wanted to play. The older of the two had my spare glove on before i knew it and we started playing catch. i played alot of baseball when i was younger, so i saw quickly that he had played before, but hadn't ever really been taught good technique, so i started coaching him through catching a fly ball step by step - two tries to get the glove in the right spot, two more to get the right hand behind the (extremely over-sized) glove to support it and two more to get that right hand in the right place so that when the ball hits, the glove closes naturally around it. then i had an epiphany - WAIT A SECOND!!!!!! I'M FOLK KNOWLEDGING!!!!!!!! i immediately sent Ashley to get a camera to document this accidental completion of a requirement for my civ class. we kept playing catch (the younger one wanted to play but we only had two gloves, so he used a pink bike helmet as a glove) and soon moved on to the proper technique to fielding a ground ball. but grounders aren't nearly as exciting as pop flies, so i threw him about five more pop flies, and he decided he was done and went to play on the slide. as ash and i took the boys inside, i was left thinking "huh, so that's how this whole mother-tongue-folk-knowledge thing happens. little incongruous chunks of teaching and learning disguised as games" i realize that this isn't always the case, but then i analyzed how i gained my baseball knowledge. baseball has a very rich history. it was started in the early 1800's as a variant of the British game rounders, though some say it started independently. by 1856, it was already known as "America's pastime" and today it is a huge part of our sports culture (go braves!!) but! did i know any of the history stuff before i started working on this assignment? no. baseball just was. baseball was what my older brother and i spent hours and hours and hours out doing in the yard from the time the snow was melted enough to run in it till it got too deep again. but mostly, baseball was what my dad (who was also my coach)(who in another era played in the oregon state little league championship game) tought me exactly the way i taugh my nephew. bit by bit, little Jared learned how to catch a fly ball the sam way my nephew did. (and wearing the same glove too - how bout that!). and the transmission of that knowledge seemed an entirely natural expression of the mother tongue in me. i didn't go out there to strictly run a class on the fundamentals and rules of baseball, i was just trying to keep my nephews from exploding by providing an outlet for a little bit of their energy. maybe that's the root of alot of folk knowledge - parents asking themselves "what did dad do with me when i was being rambunctious?" the answer to and ensuing actions resulting from this question are not a logical "well, i would play baseball with them, but they don't know baseball - let's teach them how - ok, so the lesson plan for today is..." NO! it's just "let's play ball" and the rest follows naturally.

Images from top to bottom:
-me celebrating a great catch by my nephew
-him fielding a ground ball
-the glove I learned to catch with


so the video inserted here adds nothing at all to the content of this blog post, but it is good for a nice chuckle.