(GLO — Feb/10 — I think the Heath boys have a new book out soon. I recommend their writing and thinking to you.)
In Chip and Dan Heath’s bestseller “Made to Stick”, they talk about the “Curse of Knowledge”, or what happens to our human thinking after we know something and how hard it becomes to imagine what it was like not to know it. That knowledge has “cursed” us, and “it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”
Schoolers suffer from that Curse of Knowledge. It shows in every attempt at communicating with parents. Their ongoing attempts at communication suffer from enormous information imbalances. “You can’t unlearn what you already know,” Chip and Dan write. But fighting back against that Knowledge is absolutely vital in making the message live for those who do not already possess it.
How that Curse of Knowledge operates to hamper communications is illustrated by the authors by reference to psychological research conducted between “tappers” and “listeners”. The tappers were asked to tap out one of 25 well-known tunes (like “Happy Birthday to You”) by simply knocking on a table. The listeners job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (You can try this at home, Gentle Parent.)
In the psychological research, listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs. Listening is hard.
But here is part of why it is hard.
Before the listeners guessed, the researchers asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted the odds were 50%.
Why did the tappers BELIEVE they were getting their message across 1 out of every 2 times, but the message only GOT ACROSS 1 time out of every 40? Because the tappers knew the song they were tapping. It was playing in their heads. All the listeners could hear were taps on a table.
The tappers could not understand how the listeners could be so dumb.
Schoolers can’t understand how parents can be so dumb sometimes, too.
What don’t parents get about “readiness to learn”?
Why is it so easy for parents to get children to 3 hours of hockey practice per week, but so hard to get 15 minutes of reading practice?
What’s so hard for parents to hear about “don’t drop off children in school parking lots”? (Actually, that one SHOULDN’T BE hard to hear at all…)
“Curse” parents with even just a little bit of the knowledge schoolers have, and the tunes might be more readily picked up.
But as long as government schools trouble to invest in parent knowledge only a single penny out of every 10,000 pennies, schooler songs will continue to just be noise to parents.
And it will continue to be children who are genuinely cursed by this tone-deaf partnership.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com