E-DOT

I was a teacher, a young one, and not yet very good at my trade.

I was also a father, with a son named Martin, whom my wife and I took swimming when he was about five months old. He took to the water like he remembered his first nine months.

Somewhere in his third year I thought I might introduce him to diving.

But…

But I did not do the traditional, “Martin, we’re going to learn to dive, so stand here on the edge of the pool, raise your hands over your head, shove off, and drop hands-and-head-first into the pool.”

We started with Martin holding my hands and jumping into the pool. It was not long until he was jumping in without holding my hands.

Then came a period of jumping in… climbing out… jumping in… climbing out – a period I began to think would never end.

Until one night. Martin had done his jumping in… climbing out routine for a while, and then, after a brief meditative communion with the water, he raised his hands over his head and launched himself into a dive. First attempt, a technically perfect dive.

Without quite realizing that I was doing it, I allowed that experience to wander around with my other musings, and eventually came up with an explanation – not of what I had done, but of what Martin had done.

For whatever reason, diving became what his young spirit convinced him he ought to do, and from there he worked the process out in his mind and his body. And then he simply dived.

Meantime, I was metaphorically sucking on my thumb and cogitating the journey Martin and I had taken together – the process, if you will, and what I came up with was what I now shorthand as E-DOT – Environment. Direction. Ownership. Time.

Martin’s Environment was the YMCA swimming pool and our fellowship.

His Direction was diving – not that he was told to dive, but that he found that he wanted to.

The project – learning to dive – was Martin’s. He had Ownership of the learning process.

In addition, Martin had the Time he needed. Not the artificial and arbitrary time period established by someone else, but the time his spirit told him he needed.

E-DOT.

It’s how we learn.