Find three objects representative of toys or things you played with as a very young child. Set aside twenty minutes to listen to the audio guide, perform the exercise. Write a 250-word response to your exercise experience and post the essay in the Discussion Board for the exercise for class comments. The purpose is to go back and play, just as you would as a child. In your re-experience of childhood, you are alone with no others interfering with your experience. Set a timer and do not stop the exercise until twenty minutes have elapsed. Use no electronic devices for toys or amusement, they must be common, ordinary objects or toys. At that moment, use the imagination to create with the objects you brought on the journey. Everyone made a fort from chairs and a blanket or an old refrigerator box. Everyone drew a picture of their house, or had a “woo-woo” garment, that consisted of an old towel tied around your neck while your running through the yard pretending you are flying saying, “Woo! Woo!” Be sure to talk about what you experienced while playing as if you were a child. Be specific! What did you do? How did it affect you? It may be helpful to read the attached descriptions and quotations below.

Rubric Exercise 3 (1)

 Criteria 

 This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeThe Childhood Space

Find three objects that are representative of toys or things you would have played with as a very young child. Set aside twenty minutes to listen to the audio guide and write a 250-word, minimum response to your experience to the exercise and post in the Discussion Board for the exercise. Set a timer for twenty minutes and play with those objects as if you were a child. Do not use any electronic devices, only common, ordinary objects. There will be moments when you become bored, do not stop! Those are the most important moments of the exercise. MAKE SURE YOU DISCUSS YOUR EXPERIENCE WHILE PLAYING AS IF YOU WERE A CHILD!

 Ratings 

 7 pts

Exceeds expectations

The exercise participant describes moments of becoming engrossed in a “play” activity and reflects on personal connections with their past. Composition and language mechanics are observed in your essay. MAKE SURE YOU DISCUSS YOUR EXPERIENCES WHILE PLAYING AS IF YOU WERE A CHILD!

Howis a child’s perception different from an adult’s?

Quotations and explanatory
support materials for the Childhood
Space Exercise
. . . Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom
of heaven.-Matthew 18:2

Children are the most creative people in the world, because they don’t know the rules
yet—Cressida Cowell, author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon and
Wizards of Once books

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play. .
. leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing
both.– James A. Michener

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will . . .—Baudelaire

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never
losing your enthusiasm.– Aldous Huxley

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.—
Pablo Picasso

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”–
George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is more serious than child’s play.—Dr. Tony E. Medlin

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will, . . . The child sees
everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we
call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour . . .
[The great artist is one] who is never for a moment without the genius of childhood — a
genius for which no aspect of life has become stale… master of that only too difficult art
— sensitive spirits will understand me — of being sincere without being absurd.–
Baudelaire

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most
important ways you are much more mature than I am. . . . But in many other ways
obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s
something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only
as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless
loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner
storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in
fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two
three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for
dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a
whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the
outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we
usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough
time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense
for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with
that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an
intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they
respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is
the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been
protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed
to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for
taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And
that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its
own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is

vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind
the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is
being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is
the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t
understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded
a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all
the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth
having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account
and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its
core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control
of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive,
suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so,
wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves
inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown
into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet
that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be
overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources —
not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to
cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most
people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary,
careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things
that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away
under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a
monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful
struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and
incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge,
and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with
yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much
they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing
people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart,
didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.—Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate of
England, Writer, Author of “The Iron Giant” (the basis for Pete Townsend’s rock opera,
“The Iron Giant” and the animation by the same name), and former husband of Sylvia
Plath

What would you like to tell people? I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they
should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I
think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around
events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together to not feel
alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from
childhood how to spend time with himself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but
that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself — because people who grow bored in their
own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.—Andrei
Tarkovsky, Film Director

Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and
every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended

anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse
restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a
desire. . . . Boredom is actually a precarious process in which the child is, as it were,
both waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly
negotiated; and in this sense boredom is akin to free-floating attention. In the muffled,
sometimes irritable confusion of boredom the child is reaching to a recurrent sense of
emptiness out of which his real desire can crystallize… The capacity to be bored can be
a developmental achievement for the child. . . . How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is
met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as
though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly
interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be
interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the
process of taking one’s time.—Adam Phillips, British Psychoanalyst and Writer

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we can. The world is
awash in details of color, form, sound — but to function, we have to ignore some of it.
The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity,
attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as
irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them. . . . One perceptual constraint that
I knowingly labor under is the constraint that we all create for ourselves: we summarize
and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance—all in
an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day.
The artist seems to retain something of the child’s visual strategy: how to look at the
world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that
catches the eye. An infant treats objects with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic
truck is of no more intrinsic worth to the child than an empty box is, until the former is
called a toy and the latter is called garbage. My son was as entranced by the ubiquitous
elm seeds near our doorstep as any of the menus, mail, flyers, or trash that concern the
adults.—Alexandra Horowitz, Child Psychologist

To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen . . . Once you look at
what seems ordinary long enough, though, it often turns odd and unfamiliar, as any
child repeatedly saying his own name aloud learns. I had the suspicion that walking with
Kalman would be the ambulatory equivalent of saying my own name aloud a hundred
times.—Anais Nin, Author

Students experienced difficulty accessing these articles. I am substituting direct links to
the original publications.

If you need inspiration, an artist did photographic studies of objects she found in her
preschooler’s pockets.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sweet-photo-series-reveals-whats-in-a-preschoolers-
pockets_n_56fbdde3e4b0a06d58041b04 (Links to an external site.)
“Let Children Get Bored Again.” I’ve replaced that with the link below to the original
NYT’s article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/children-bored.html (Links to an
external site.)

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sweet-photo-series-reveals-whats-in-a-preschoolers-pockets_n_56fbdde3e4b0a06d58041b04

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sweet-photo-series-reveals-whats-in-a-preschoolers-pockets_n_56fbdde3e4b0a06d58041b04

There were also issues accessing these articles about Mr. Rogers. I’ve substituted
direct links to the Esquire articles:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/ (Links to
an external site.)
and
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29871607/tom-junod-mister-rogers-a-
beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood-true-story/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29871607/tom-junod-mister-rogers-a-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood-true-story/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29871607/tom-junod-mister-rogers-a-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood-true-story/