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Talkabout Tuesday 08: Laughter and Learning

ai-in-the-air_tt-ep-08
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Summary

Laughter as indicator of learning - kids laugh when their brain is figuring something out. Mastery brings seriousness and dedication, but first stage of learning is laughing. Failure + laughter = loosened brain to try new approaches. Belly laughing as practice - good for stomach, back, heart, and soul.

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Anna in the air under the sky and around Baltimore talk about Tuesday.
0:07 This is where I talk about some topic about the Sudbury schooling. It's
0:15 another late day. I had to put away the tent today and took a long time so I'm
0:24 gonna keep this brief but basically I just wanted to touch on a topic that I
0:32 think I've mentioned before and that's you know the importance of laughter. In
0:38 my mind when I look around the school and I see kids laughing and carry on I
0:44 see learning particularly young kids they love you can tell whenever there's
0:50 something that they're really kind of like getting their brain around because
0:55 they're laughing. They love to laugh when they're learning and you know if you're
1:02 if you think they're learning and they're not laughing they're not really
1:05 learning. They may be able to absorb some skills maybe for time but it's not
1:13 really it's not the brain figuring something out let's just put it that way.
1:20 Now you know when one gets into a point of better mastery of something really
1:27 you know like you know really trying to get good at something particular laughter
1:34 tends to fade away. There's a seriousness that comes about. Dedication the look of
1:40 of intention and you know so that's that's different although ideally I
1:52 think this is a deep satisfaction that comes from all that but the first stage
1:58 of learning I really believe is laughing. When you get something and you start
2:02 messing around with it and some silly stuff and you don't know what you're
2:06 doing I mean you know we were trying to power wash this tent cover dry it out
2:14 fold it up you know and things didn't go well and you know we laughed about it
2:19 and and that loosened up our brains to figure out other ways of doing stuff.
2:23 That's a secret success for humans is you know when one has the opportunity to
2:32 fail one can sit back and laugh about it and just try and carry on and it's
2:41 really great fun. So laughter I think it's really important to keep that in
2:47 mind as we enter well we'll probably be very likely transitioning to online so
2:58 we won't hear each other's laughter as much but I hope we all do continue to
3:03 laugh these times are pretty stressful there's a lot going on in the world
3:10 to be very stressful and you know I just hope just really hope that everyone can
3:15 find some way to keep laughing particularly letting the young ones
3:20 laugh there's you know you just they're running back and forth in the field
3:26 waving stuff around jumping on this and that and you know they're just full of
3:34 life that's what I see I see life I see life looking at the world and figuring
3:39 out how it works and having just great joy and it's like man like they're
3:50 gaining years and moments you know so I think that's really cool also I love the
4:01 sun glinting off for building it's pretty beautiful so yeah anyway if I had
4:09 some sense of humor I'd actually tell a joke or something but I don't so you
4:16 know you just start laughing I am really good at belly laughing or at least it
4:21 used to be used to like just belly laugh every day that's you know laughter
4:25 coming deep from the belly oh that feels good I mean it's a really good skill to
4:40 practice just you know if you have nothing to laugh about just try to force
4:44 the belly laugh and I mean you know anyway yeah that's right I can do much
4:51 for but if you really say okay I'm gonna belly laughing it's just so good and you
5:07 know the stomach gets real tight you know so that's how adults laugh kids
5:12 they're just laughing laughing laughing like they're breathing you know adults
5:16 it's it's much more it's much more belly all right well that's enough about
5:24 laughing don't want to bore you I want you to stress out I just want you to
5:28 laugh so you know give a few belly laughs every day and you'll have a
5:33 strong strong stomach good back healthy heart happy soul all righty all right
5:47 have a good one