Order is an important thing. Whether you’re talking about how to put a hamburger together or how to put on your pants, the ordering of how things are done is important. If I zip up and button the pants before I put my legs in, I’m going to have trouble. While this seems obvious to must of us concerning our daily routines, it is not obvious to children. Our son has recently demonstrated his sometimes confused sense of order to tasks that we take for granted. Years of simply doing things have habitualized certain behaviors and tasks into things we don’t think about. Putting on pants is as uninvolved as breathing or letting your heart beat. Still, I’m always reminded of one exercise an instructor of mine does that demonstrates this point better than any other.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time at all you’ll know that I’m a theatre guy. I like to pretend. One of my professors shared a secret with me one time about an exercise he gave that never failed to clearly separate the students who actually did the assignment and those that did not. What he did was ask them to go home, turn on the oven at a high temperature for about twenty minutes with a pan inside (and cook something if you must), and then pull the pan out and set it on top of the stove. They were to take specific note of everything that happens when they do this so they could recreate this meaningless event to the entire class the next day. My teacher happily asked, “Do you know how I could tell who hadn’t done the assignment?” We didn’t know, of course, but he continued, “They’re the ones who don’t recoil from the heat of the oven as they open the door and that rush of hot air comes out. They just focus on pulling out the pan.” If you’ve ever used an oven you know this to be true. It happened to me just today — I had to quickly pull my face back and turn my head. Some students, failing that moment, tried to react to the heat of the item the removed from the oven, but it was too late because the spell was broken. They hadn’t paid attention to the proper steps.
So it is with our son. He sometimes does things in the wrong order. Washing his hands with water and then putting soap on them comes to mind. Order is important. Don’t forget about the heat from the oven.