Exegesis
Mon., August 8, 05:53 PM
I learned a new word this morning. Despite my regular e-mail from My Word a Day, this doesn’t happen very often. The site is an excellent way to build your vocabulary, but I’ve been learning words for a long time. Maybe 20 percent are words I haven’t heard before, and at least half of those are not as precise as words I already know. However…
exegesis (noun) [ek'•sah•JEE•sis] an explanation or critical interpretation, such as an interpretation of a Biblical passage. In this case, I’m not attempting to translate Biblical wisdom. Nevertheless, it’s a good word for something else I read this morning.
My friend Auntie-Mari quoted the following from advice on how to build your child’s self-esteem:
It certainly seems to be valid advice, but like “build a dialogue,” it seems to miss the point – if it does have one. So I began to look at some cause-and-effect issues regarding the dialogue with your kids.
From the time your babies are born, you talk at them. It’s a natural thing to do: “Mommy loves you”; “what a pretty baby!”; “mm, good cereal”; “where’s Daddy?” Babies imitate, and as soon as they start answering and you continue the conversation, dialogue has begun. The trick, then, is do not stop. Instead, you listen. Almost as soon as a child begins to talk, s/he asks questions. You answer them.
Some of them are easy. Some are harder; you have to tailor your replies to the child’s ability to understand. Sometimes you don’t know either, and the best response is “let’s look it up.” My brother used to say one of the most annoying things about me is that I want to know and I want to prove that I know; looking things up was “pulling a l’empress.”
Back in the day when my kids were little, before we had computers and internet, we did have books. I had a set of encyclopedia, and I had Time-Life books on science and nature. “Let’s find a picture.” I was so proud of my son when he watched “The Karate Kid.” Question: Mom, is Okinawa a real place? Yes, it is. And he went straight to the encyclopedia, stopping only to check the spelling with me. (If I didn’t know how to spell something, we did have dictionaries.)
The dialogues never stopped. The dynamic may change; sometimes I’m asking the kids. All three are expert researchers. (People make requests of U.D. so often that someone sent her a T-shirt that says, “I’m not your damned search engine.”) Son did most of the research related to my cancer – diagnoses, treatments, side effects. I was wiped out; I just couldn’t get started. He did it for me.
Let’s go back to self-esteem for a minute. We know that low self-esteem is especially destructive to mental health. But unwarranted self-esteem – that is to say, being proud of yourself without having any good reason to be proud – is detrimental not only to the well-being of the individual but also to the people around him (or her). When you teach a child to research answers to his own questions, you have taught him something that he sees as important.
This week’s mini-page had articles about pioneer children and how they did chores. Hard work being a kid in the old days, wasn’t it? But the child whose job was to bring in the firewood knew that his job was important to the whole family; thus he was important to his family. How’s that for building self-esteem? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that bringing in the crop is more important than tidying your room – supposing that you actually had your own room.
That's enough exegesis for today.
Today’s illogic: 50th reunion for B— Junior High School. In the Middle Ages, junior high schools were, more or less, what they now call middle schools. (There is actually some logic in this whole invitation, but you have to see where my train of thought led.) Yes, it really is fifty years, but why would there be a reunion? Most of us went continued at the same high school, which does hold reunions. We all went on to high school because none of us were old enough to leave school when we graduated from junior high.
Well, the e-mail came from classmates.com; I guess I could look further. Maybe there were messages in there. No messages; just the names of the three of us who fit the parameters. No one from our class is doing anything about this. I know because something happened within our senior year that greatly affected the school for the next couple of years. I’m not publishing the “spoiler,” because I’m waiting to see whether someone turns up who really knows.
What this is, is classmates.com trying to get us to bring them more members. So there is some logic to it; it’s just not ours. Furthermore, I could have told them that we three are least likely to follow up on their invite.
