During my second year in graduate school, as part of my department's requirements that we take one graduate course in another department, I took a seminar on child development with Alison Gopnik in the psychology department. I was extremely fortunate all throughout graduate school to have stellar coursework and brilliant professors, and this seminar was no exception. Child development was my primary emphasis in the psychology major as an undergraduate, and it's still an area I find fascinating; discovering that the seminar included historical perspectives was just an extra bonus.
One of the things we discussed in the class was the idea of imitative learning--kids will learn to do certain things by watching adult behaviors and mimicking them. It's not just functional imitation, though. They'll incorporate imitation into play, and Alison pointed out to us that if you spend any time observing children through these learning processes, you'll eventually realize that there's no easy way to distinguish when a particular behavior is play and when it's become a learned act. Take, for example, using a hairbrush. A kid will see his parents using a hairbrush to brush their hair. While playing, the kid might pick up a wooden spoon and run it along his hair, pretending that the spoon is a hairbrush. Later, in another context, he'll perform the same act, but with an actual hairbrush instead of a wooden spoon. He's still playing, he's still just pretending to brush his hair, but he's pretending by running an actual hairbrush over his actual hair. At some point later on, he'll be really brushing his hair, but it's very hard to pin down the point where pretending stops.
This discussion really stuck with me, though, because of Alison's off-hand observation that this process continues into adulthood. At first you're kind of playacting at cleaning your house and paying your bills, but eventually you're a fully-functioning adult person, and where's the line?
I've been spending my morning cleaning the house--I'm supposed to be planning lectures, but I'm trying to work out some timeline issues in the syllabus, and I need to think a little more. I like cleaning as thinking time; it's not thinking-intensive on its own, and at the end of it you have a clean house, so that's a nice bonus. (The problem, of course, is that sometimes I very abruptly realize that I've solved whatever problem I was unravelling, and run off back to the computer while all the stuff I was reorganizing in the living room is still flopping about in big messy stacks in the middle of the floor.) I've been cleaning my own living spaces for ten or twelve years now, and I'm still surprised at how much of it still feels like I'm in that imitative play-acting space. I just finished cleaning off the stovetop, for instance. We have a gas stove, so every time I clean it, I have to clear the burners afterwards; the little gas-holes get water in them, so they don't always light cleanly right away, and sometimes have to be helped along with a match flame. Every time I do this, it feels like a conscious imitation, like I'm copying some behavior I observed as a kid. (But where? We had an electric stove, when I was growing up.)
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