Once up on a time, I took the SSAT. I can't remember if they had the timed story creation portion back then. If it did, I would love to know what story I created. But before I took the SSAT, I did Olympics of the Mind (now Odyssey of the Mind) and I do remember practicing spontaneous story creation as prep for state competition... it was a lot of fun and some of the stories were truly terrible. I have memories of a story I created about the promo (a glass of water) and how an ant thought it was an Olympic sized swimming pool. Why that is so vivid in my mind I have no idea, but I digress...
I'm totally going to try your SSAT story format prompts as a homeschool activity with my kid next week. But I might set it up as a Ling Ling workout challenge with the prompts on cards that we draw and then have the attempts be types of stories (boring, simple, complicated, scary, funny, etc).
Brandon - we had fun with the story framework/prompts yesterday! My kid created this fantastic story about an outdoor metal door who really wanted to rust so people wouldn't open and close it all the time. But what the door didn't realized was that it wasn't in fact made out of metal. So it went out and tried to get wet several different ways (each time failing for a funny reason) and then finally when it did get wet it realized it wasn't rusting and that it was therefore not in fact made of metal, and it turned out it wasn't even a door -- it was actually a pillow! (which was a curveball I did not see coming at all...)
I'm so curious to hear where the other prompts will lead us...
Brandon -- can you pls unpack Egan's views that this is a tragic loss from a good education a bit more because I feel like I'm missing something here.
While it may be true that once you can see the details and understand the inner workings you might not enjoy something in the same simple, general, emotional response-driven sort of way, I don't think that means you can't enjoy it any longer...sure you might not enjoy lesser more common version of it (this certainly can happen with food, music, wine, etc.) but you can still enjoy a good elegant story, meal, music, wine, fine art, architecture, software code, etc., etc.
Once up on a time, I took the SSAT. I can't remember if they had the timed story creation portion back then. If it did, I would love to know what story I created. But before I took the SSAT, I did Olympics of the Mind (now Odyssey of the Mind) and I do remember practicing spontaneous story creation as prep for state competition... it was a lot of fun and some of the stories were truly terrible. I have memories of a story I created about the promo (a glass of water) and how an ant thought it was an Olympic sized swimming pool. Why that is so vivid in my mind I have no idea, but I digress...
I'm totally going to try your SSAT story format prompts as a homeschool activity with my kid next week. But I might set it up as a Ling Ling workout challenge with the prompts on cards that we draw and then have the attempts be types of stories (boring, simple, complicated, scary, funny, etc).
I'll let you know how it goes, especially if it totally bombs and I need ideas for a relaunch attempt!
Brandon - we had fun with the story framework/prompts yesterday! My kid created this fantastic story about an outdoor metal door who really wanted to rust so people wouldn't open and close it all the time. But what the door didn't realized was that it wasn't in fact made out of metal. So it went out and tried to get wet several different ways (each time failing for a funny reason) and then finally when it did get wet it realized it wasn't rusting and that it was therefore not in fact made of metal, and it turned out it wasn't even a door -- it was actually a pillow! (which was a curveball I did not see coming at all...)
I'm so curious to hear where the other prompts will lead us...
Huzzah! It’s still weird to me how effective this simple story structure is…
Can you expand on this statement? "When you learn how a piece of art works, you (mostly) can’t enjoy it in the same simple way you already have."
I think I've generally found that the opposite is true, but maybe we mean different things.
> It’s part of what Egan refers to as one of the tragic losses one gets from a good education
Ah! I missed that. I wonder if that is the real problem with Eganism: it makes education so good the “tragic losses” become unbearable to sustain…
Brandon -- can you pls unpack Egan's views that this is a tragic loss from a good education a bit more because I feel like I'm missing something here.
While it may be true that once you can see the details and understand the inner workings you might not enjoy something in the same simple, general, emotional response-driven sort of way, I don't think that means you can't enjoy it any longer...sure you might not enjoy lesser more common version of it (this certainly can happen with food, music, wine, etc.) but you can still enjoy a good elegant story, meal, music, wine, fine art, architecture, software code, etc., etc.