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The Importance of Categorizing

I think as educators - and parents - we forget sometimes the true value of the skills that we should be passing onto our students.  We get so caught up in what we want to teach them.  For an English teacher, I get so wrapped up in the stories.  I want to read short stories and novels and to explore poetry.  These are lofty goals, but if students don't possess the skill sets to understand the complexity, then I waste very valuable time.

We all search for answers.  We need to find a way to organize all the small, intricate pieces of our own lives.

All the crazy parts of a life.
"My life, my crazy life - I don't know where to put everything," Paige says to her mother.

As children, we should've had toys that allowed us to sort through and then categorize things:  blocks, legos, puzzles, etc.  This skill of sorting and categorizing is extremely important for humans.  We must be able to do this effortlessly in order to function in our society.

Imagine a huge room filled with row after row of filing cabinets.  This is our internal processor, our brain.  The only way a huge room of file cabinets works is when new papers and files are placed in their proper places immediately.  What would happen if google suddenly stopped sorting and categorizing our search terms?  We would never find what we are looking for.

As we become more and more technological, we become more and more overstimulated.  More than anytime in our previous histories, we must have an ability to quickly and effortlessly catalog all the bits and pieces of what are our lives.

When we as educators forget this, we lose focus on the bigger picture.  We are not just imparting facts to students, but we are developing in them processes that will guide and sustain them throughout their lives.


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