A-B-C to “War and Peace”

The English language has just 26 letters. And out of those letters we can express an infinite number of ideas once we learn how to string those letters together into words and sentences. We begin that process as children, first learning A-B-C’s. Initially we have no idea what the point of all those shapes and sounds might be. According to my friend, Heather, who did her doctoral thesis on childhood language development, there is an ah-ha moment for the child when he or she realizes that there is a correlation between the shapes, sounds, and words.

I [more...]

On being particular, every day

The other day I was writing about reinforcement and that by doing nothing to get in the way of a behavior is the same as rewarding it.  Then, while riding yesterday and today I realized that I was letting my mare, Danke, get out of balance and I was doing absolutely nothing about it!  So, guess what? Since I allowed this to continue, of course, little by little the problem was getting bigger and bigger. Finally, I gave myself a ‘whack upside the head’ and got with my own program!

In a kind of out of body experience [more...]