I was fully immersed in the process of adapting to Aran's school (it was the fourth day I was going), about a month ago, when suddenly I saw a chair with a sign that baptized her as "The thinking chair". The horror took hold of me for an instant, that in which you realize that Spain will never be like Finland because there the best teachers are with the little ones, and then I came back to me because my son needed me.
This thought shook me again a few days ago, walking around the IKEA (well, rather than walking letting me go through the human tide), when we saw some furniture as a home office, to put a computer, dozens of books on the walls and to Sit in the silence of a quiet afternoon to read and think. "This is it a real corner of thinking", I told myself.
The desire of the reading corner
The first thing I visualized when we bought the Miriam apartment and I was a large table where we could accommodate two or three people to read, write or whatever it took. Now, after the years, I would even like to have one of those small armchairs where to support one arm on each side and enjoy a good book.
I had the table and now I have neither a table nor an armchair, because the one that was our office disappeared to create a room to play, that is, a room where there are two tables for children with their two chairs, furniture with books and toys and space to play. Nothing more and nothing less).
I love to see my children playing in that room, but a part of me, the one that looks to the coming years, yearns to have something similar to what I saw in IKEA, a Reading corner, an area where I sit to enjoy music, reading, peace, cultivation of the mind or a place to sit and think.
How different do adults and children think?
I, an adult, wishing to recover those moments in which you can dedicate yourself to thinking and growing as a person and thus seeing positive thinking and children, in schools and in many houses, hating their thinking corner, their thinking chair, because there spend a few minutes isolated from others, forced to think of something. Well "forbid me and I will, force me and I will hate it“.
I do not want to tell my son one day "we are going to think about how we can do this" and that his heart skips a beat remembering that chair that only children who misbehaved occupied and, obviously, I do not want him to do like a few days ago , who took some pieces of wood that fell in full construction and began throwing away while saying "think!" every time he threw one.
Thinking, and having time to sit in a chair to do it is one of the most wonderful things that exist. Damn the people who appropriated the stillness and the calm, the enjoyment of loneliness to develop the imagination, to read and to simply think to transform everything into a moment of punishment, humiliation and as a method to remove and ignore children, when the child's mischief, misdeed or "crime" should be used to make everyone reflect, but positive.
Everyone to think?
Of course. The whole class to think. What is being done is stopped and what happened is explained, they are asked, they are allowed to ask questions, they are told about friendship, about the value of sharing space and time and joining efforts to add, and not to subtract, from how nice it is to be treated well and how humiliating it is to be treated badly, how easy it is to surround yourself with people when you respect others and how easy it is to stay alone when others feel you are being mistreated.
When a child does something wrong the teacher has lucky to be able to use that fact to teach everyone. It is a master class of values, of living together, of learning to live. An opportunity to establish common bonds all, teacher and children and among the same children. The pity is that instead of doing something like that, thinking becomes a corner of loneliness where you can stay for a little while. Humiliating for some and absurd for others. The humiliated will still modify their behavior, despite everything, those who see it absurd, no.
And at home the same. Every mistake, every disrespect is an opportunity to explain to our children how important it is to be able to live with other people without bothering. But not distancing ourselves through the punishment of sitting down to think, but rather through learning, personal enrichment of yours and ours, of dialogue and to share that moment in which there is so much to learn.
