Mind Like An Eight-Year-Old
Jun. 24th, 2008 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liralenIt's fascinating playing strategy games with Jet.
He learns like a shark eats. Big, huge gulps of experience all incorporated nearly instantaneously. With his only job really being learning about his world and how things work, he does it with a smooth integration that isn't step-by-step. It's all at once in big leaps.
Mancala, Stratego, Battleship, Risk, Rat-a-Tat-Cat, Quartto, and Uno are all favorites now, and every time we play he displays yet another strategy and another willingness to try something new that just flabbergasts me. Especially in Stratego as he hasn't won a game against John and I, yet, and still he plays.
Uhm. Yeah. We don't "go easy" on him. It seems to make him learn faster and he's got the courage and self-confidence to just keep trying, and that only builds as he wins at the other games. I can't seem to win at Rat-a-Tat-Cat with him anymore, as he's got a system he's put together of what kinds of values and which cards he's had to have seen as well as a really good feel for when to "call" the game.
And with the post-game analysis, he often comes up with whole strategies and he's so pleased when he thinks of them himself and then uses them to good advantage the next time. He understands that in Stratego, it's hard to do both the defense and offense at the same time, that thinking both ways is different, and that he's starting to build a repertory of how to put various levels of fighters together to make them more effective. And before I even said it he said, "Well there's really three things, defending, attacking, and finding out what you have." We talk about it together, after, and I think that extra time to think it through makes each game he plays another step up.
It's fun watching. Both John and I have the Strategy Gallup Strength, where if we see a sea of data, of intelligence, we can pick the best path through it for any particular group or goal; and it's fun seeing how Jet takes to it like a duckling to water. How to see the big picture, the whole picture, and to find out about what's missing. What is it you really want? Where do you really want to go? What sacrifices are you willing to make? And Jet's picking it all up in his own way with his own values, and his own methods of measurement of what's acceptable and what's not.
It's going to be fun to see what he does with it all.
He learns like a shark eats. Big, huge gulps of experience all incorporated nearly instantaneously. With his only job really being learning about his world and how things work, he does it with a smooth integration that isn't step-by-step. It's all at once in big leaps.
Mancala, Stratego, Battleship, Risk, Rat-a-Tat-Cat, Quartto, and Uno are all favorites now, and every time we play he displays yet another strategy and another willingness to try something new that just flabbergasts me. Especially in Stratego as he hasn't won a game against John and I, yet, and still he plays.
Uhm. Yeah. We don't "go easy" on him. It seems to make him learn faster and he's got the courage and self-confidence to just keep trying, and that only builds as he wins at the other games. I can't seem to win at Rat-a-Tat-Cat with him anymore, as he's got a system he's put together of what kinds of values and which cards he's had to have seen as well as a really good feel for when to "call" the game.
And with the post-game analysis, he often comes up with whole strategies and he's so pleased when he thinks of them himself and then uses them to good advantage the next time. He understands that in Stratego, it's hard to do both the defense and offense at the same time, that thinking both ways is different, and that he's starting to build a repertory of how to put various levels of fighters together to make them more effective. And before I even said it he said, "Well there's really three things, defending, attacking, and finding out what you have." We talk about it together, after, and I think that extra time to think it through makes each game he plays another step up.
It's fun watching. Both John and I have the Strategy Gallup Strength, where if we see a sea of data, of intelligence, we can pick the best path through it for any particular group or goal; and it's fun seeing how Jet takes to it like a duckling to water. How to see the big picture, the whole picture, and to find out about what's missing. What is it you really want? Where do you really want to go? What sacrifices are you willing to make? And Jet's picking it all up in his own way with his own values, and his own methods of measurement of what's acceptable and what's not.
It's going to be fun to see what he does with it all.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 04:39 pm (UTC)At work they just put us through one of those personality-evaluation courses... this particular one is based somewhat on Myers-Briggs (which I probably misspelled due to not looking it up) but they do it in terms of four colors. Blue: intellectual, data-driven; red: goal-oriented, success-driven; green: feeling, harmony-driven; and yellow: social, interactivity-driven. You get a classification based on what order those colors are stacked for you, and then sub-divided by how many are prominent.
I ended up with the colors Blue, Green, Red, Yellow (from strongest to weakest), with blue and green both rated high and red and yellow rated relatively lower. I'll accept that :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 07:18 pm (UTC)Which seems to cut across your colors in a way... but... those are what I had. The only ones John and I shared were Strategy and Achiever, and it made a lot of sense. He had the high-end version of Developer, which is to take really Good people and help make them Great. I was happy when Jet started recognizing "the" in books.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 05:34 pm (UTC)It has to be so incredibly awesome to see him develop like that! Heh, the more I hear of him, the more I am assured that he will be a proper geek when he grows up *grins* Go him!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 07:20 pm (UTC)He loves sports, loves swimming, tennis, and loves people, interacting with them and doing things for and with them. He's extremely social and obliging, and can get nearly anyone to do nearly anything for him. That's bemusing and a little scary to watch in action in some ways, but he's like his dad that way. The cold calculating stuff is purely me.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 07:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 02:48 pm (UTC)Just like his father and I, he's definitely that detail-oriented, have to learn everything about it kind of geek. *grin*