Finished Products
Posted on Nov 04, 2009
A nagging concern for me is the prevalent cultural attitude that young people are expected to be “finished products” very young in life. The truth is that maturation is a very long process. The child we see today is more like a rolling hula-hoop than an arrow in flight. Some days children are up, but most days they are either on their way up … or down. As parents, teachers and coaches we need to remember that on any given day, regardless of a child’s age, we are not seeing our young people fully developed. Although we continually and correctly call them to high expectations in every way, we need to save our final judgments for another day.
A young boy was given by his mother to be raised by his grandparents. In this particular case that was not a healthy idea; the boy began a childhood of disagreement and anger. Soon he was failing classes in school. As you would guess, he was withdrawn from school to return to the family farm; however, he soon proved to be a lackluster farmer and unsuccessful there too. He returned to school and eventually earned entrance into Trinity College, Cambridge. University life provided the opportunity to explore new interests, but these rarely agreed with his classroom assignments. Renowned mathematics Professor Isaac Barrow could clearly tell that the young man was unmoved by Euclidian geometry but could not tell that he was privately mastering the works of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi and Thomas Hobbes on his own time. Graduation (without honors) was followed by more private study and shortly after his return to Cambridge in 1667 he was appointed to replace his math professor as the distinguished Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The world was beginning to discover Isaac Newton! Newton produced his book De Motu in 1684. Then nearly two years later, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared. It is difficult to cite a more influential work published in the history of science. Although Isaac Newton made pivotal contributions to mathematics, optics, astronomy and, of course, to physics, to imply that he was an immediate success is a gross simplification. Many prominent and influential men in math/science circles were slow to relinquish their control of the intellectual societies. They were even slower to admit Sir Isaac Newton’s genius.
If we had judged Isaac Newton in 1653, 1663 or even in 1683 our judgments would have been embarrassingly wrong! Each child and frankly, each of us is a “work in progress.” Help to celebrate that progress in others and give yourself permission to recognize it within your own life.
