yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Why Geeking Out on Games is Good for Kids | Big Think


2m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Schools can be kind of Cromwellian places. They can be puritanical. They can be places where it's reading, writing, and arithmetic, and nothing else. And games are actually quite educational if they're educational. When you say, "Okay, we're going to play Monopoly," the first half an hour is taken up by which rules we're playing by. And there's just ridiculous disagreements.

And the same is true for physical games. I don't know if you're familiar with foursquare, but it's one of my favorite recess games. What rules are we playing with? The kids could use up all of their recess time just negotiating the rules. And it sort of seems a little bit silly, but it's actually very healthy for children to know how to negotiate and navigate.

If you think about an adult workplace and all the internal politics of who's going to lead the meeting, who gets to speak at the meeting, whose word is worth more? I mean, office politics actually is the same thing as what's going on in foursquare as they're negotiating the rules. And so having those social and emotional skills and giving kids the space and the time for that is actually very important to learning and development.

My eldest son is a special needs child and was very delayed in his language. He was three, which is very unusual, and really didn't speak very much. He kind of became more verbal after the age of three, which is very late in development. And I took him to all sorts of specialists trying to figure out what was wrong, and I got all sorts of very frightening diagnoses.

But my husband started playing chess with my son, and it was a huge sigh of relief because I could tell that there was a lot going on here, even though he had very limited verbal ability. And one of the beautiful things—there are many beautiful things about chess—but one of the beautiful things about chess is that it's non-verbal.

And in schools, teachers tend to valorize verbal agility. So I did very well as a child because I chat a lot. You could be highly, highly intelligent but not have that level of verbal agility. And so one of the things we have to do in schools is give different types of children with different strengths and growth areas opportunities to learn and be confident and excel.

And so what I love about chess is not only is it just a beautiful game and as important as mathematical thinking and strategic thinking, but it puts language aside. And so it gives children who are less verbal an opportunity to shine and be confident and have a level of mastery. And so much of school is about reading and verbal agility.

And so you create this kind of sacred space where a different kind of intelligence can kind of bubble to the top.

More Articles

View All
Peter Lynch Warns About the BIG Danger of Index Funds in Recent Interview (2021)
If you’ve been following this channel, you know Peter Lynch is one of my favorite investors to study. However, Peter Lynch hasn’t given an interview in years. So when he finally gave an interview this past week, it got my full attention. In this intervie…
Terminal prepositions | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy
Hello, Garans. Today I want to talk about ending sentences with prepositions, and I want to tell you straight up—it is totally okay. Like, it is perfectly grammatically correct and sensible and fine to end sentences with prepositions in English. And if yo…
Why Scientists Are Puzzled By This Virus
Very recently, scientists discovered that your body is teeming with trillions of the most bizarre viruses. These viruses are not your enemies but critical to your health, protecting you from disease, maybe even killing cancer. A new frontier of science, s…
Why We Aren't Who We Are | The Tragedy Of Being What You Can't Define
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” Alan Watts. In today’s society, we are expected to define who we are and take that self-image as a basis for making life decisions. For example: I’m an introvert, and from that point of vi…
Ray Dalio on The Big Debt Cycle
Just frame for us your thoughts on debt for a second. How do you think about debt as an absolute construct or a relative construct, especially sovereign debt? You know, there is a US debt, but then there are also every other 182 countries who have a ton o…
How I made $150,000 in 4 months just by buying and remodeling this property (step by step)
I would basically just try to find undervalued properties in undervalued areas where I can hit them on both ends of the spectrum. So, not only am I buying a home in an undervalued area, I’m buying an undervalued house in an undervalued area. So, I can fix…