[xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Very well, let me try to take the play discussion in a rather new direction. So far we've mostly discussed how play manages to highlight the different e-motions of very young children and mostly speculated about how this might be developmental. 
 
In some ways it seems to me that the article is rather poorly suited to this view. First of all, the actual data is not play per se but only preparation for play. One can easily imagine this play taking place without this preparation and therefore it doesn't seem a necessary component. 
 
Secondly, even if we accept the preplay discussion as a necessary stage of this form of play, it's not clear to me how e-motion is a necessary part of the resolution of the discussion. One can easily imagine the discussion being resolved without reference to friendship or best friends, etc.
 
But take the following dialogue, from our third grade textbook:
 
Minsu: I like apples.
Julie: I don't like apples.
(Minsu's mother turns the plate so Julie can see some fresh Keobong grapes)
Julie: Grapes! I like grapes.
Minsu: I don't like ...
 
When we ask the kids to continue the dialogue (either as "volleyball" or "pingpong" they will go like this for hours. They will not stick to the concept of 'fruit' either (we don't teach the word fruit, because it presents a very difficult plural in English). They will extend the use of the verb to virtually any field of experience, at hand or not. 
 
In fact, the verb "like" turns out to be BY FAR the preferred verb in third grade; the verb which is most likely to be used when we put the kids in teams or groups and ask them to improvise on ANY dialogue. This is strange, because it's not at all frequent in the material we teach.
 
So I want to suggest two ways in which play per se requires emotion and in particular requires not only emotion but the mastery of emotion. The first we can call the principle of Gratuitious Difficulty, that is, the introduction of extraneous problems and unnecessary rules whose only apparent purpose is to complicate the game, rather like the introduction of obstacles between the hero and the goal in a story. 
 
The second we can call the principle of  Guileless or Guiltless Deceit, that is, the introduction of a conceit, or an imaginary situation which is shared but also contested in some way. I want to suggest that these two principles are common to all forms of play, but not the preplay activity which the article is concerned with.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 



_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca