Today at class a student and I went through some etymology. And I just wanted to share this one. 

Kaleidoscope: from the Greek kalos (beautiful) + edios (form) + the English –scope (more at idyll). 

What a beautiful definition to explain the time spent in wonder looking at an array of reflected colours and patterns.

I had a chance to meet Tracy Alloway a few years back (she is the daughter of the principal at my homeschool and an expert in Working Memory), and I really admire her work as a psychologist. I was reading one of her books today, and I learnt of several new learning disorders. One in particular reminded me of a conversation I had once with JuYi; we were discussing if there was a correlation between messiness and clumsiness in a bus. A person with Developmental Dyspraxia, also known as Clumsy Child Syndrome, has difficulty in fine motor skills, body movement, and coordination. The disorder does not affect their intelligence, but they do have problems with retaining information in short term memory. Among many other things (they may have difficulty with languages), they would have difficulty organizing their time, keeping track of instructions, planning, regularly misplace things and have trouble with tasks that require several steps. Their disorganized behavior resembles my idea a ‘messy personality’. It just struck me as interesting. Where would we draw the line between accepted levels of clumsiness and absent-mindedness, and an actual motor disorder? If a child can’t follow all the dance moves, constantly falls and confuses her lefts and rights, is she clumsy or suffering from some other problem? When is it a disorder? When it is disruptive to us? When it is disruptive to others? I can’t remember the other ways of looking at what is abnormal (which in itself is difficult when there isn’t an accepted definition of normal behavior). I should really look this up before classes begin.