Before Drama and Beef it was Pajamas with feet (blockhead)

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I am reading the story of parents who decided to listen to what their 2 year old had to say when they were not around.
This was a project in the 1980's called "narratives from the crib". You can read about it in the book Tipping Point. When the parents noticed their daughter talking to herself at night they began recording their conversations with her as they put her to bed and then the conversations Emily would have with herself before falling asleep. The recordings were then analyzed by a bunch of linguists and psychos and "they found that Emily's conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. One observer wrote "For once the lights are out and her parents leave the room, Emily reveals a stunning mastery of language forms we would never have suspected from her (everyday) speech."

At this point I want to clarify something. A narrative is not the story itself. It is the structure or the telling of the story or retelling of a story.

One of the psychologists (bruner) said this about children "They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don't catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn't get remembered very well, and it doesn't seem to be accesible for further kinds of mulling over."

Some of the stories Emily would tell herself were "what linguists call a temoporal narrative." "She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure--a process that is a critical part of a child's mental development."
(In the book they give a really cool example of a story she tells herself. It is her ideal Friday routine.)
This is what the was written about what she said "a remarkable act of world making..." I really like that phrase "world making."
All this research and much more is what was used to create the T.V. show blues clues. They wanted to make a show better than sesame street for kids. So they set out to build upon sesame street and take it further by using the narrative. "But it becomes easy to understand how you would make a children's show even stickier that Sesame Street. You'd make it perfectly literal, without any wordplay or comedy that would confuse preschoolers. And you'd teach kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think---in the form of the story."

Watch an old episode of sesame street and one of blues clues and notice the differences. It is interesting(ss)/boring (bluesclues).

What struck me about all of this is the Hebraic way of teaching. The memorizing of the Torah. Midrash (Any of a group of Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures compiled between a.d. 400 and 1200 and based on exegesis, parable, and haggadic legend)....the retelling of stories. Parables--temporal narratives. The passing on of history and stories through story telling etc. It is a very interactive process with lots of repition.

Blues cluse is much more repetitive than sesame street ever was and this is why "If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand--things that are novel. So the driving force for a preshcooler is not a search for nevelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability (anderson)".

This is why we are bored stiff by Blues clues. It is repetitive and we are looking for novelty. We have grown up and seen it allllll before. Same s%*t different corner.

But for a child, "on each succesive watching they master more and more, guessing correctly deeper into the program, until by the end, they can anticipate every answer." The show starts easy and then gets progressively more complex.

to be continued...in the meantime read the message bibles explanation of the first five books of the bible.