the mindset of Sand Bubbler Crab
I am very grateful to you, teacher, for the book.
While reading it, the book not only opened up a new perspective on creativity for me, but also urged me to observe more closely the ordinary things around me. Especially when watching children – even in how they eat. I realized that these small behaviors are gradually shaping their future character and thinking.
Through observing young children, I was reminded of my experiences with students and colleagues at a university in Ho Chi Minh City. I began to recognize a system of interconnected links between early childhood habits and ways of thinking and acting in adulthood.
'We will no longer be mere copies of someone else, because once we can prove something ourselves, even an thousand of people in front of us won’t be frightening.'
When I heard that line, I felt as though every cell in my body had been activated. I understood that: from personal experience to the ability to prove it through action that is the journey of true creativity.
A very specific example is a breakfast outing I had with two 5-year-old students and their parents.
Child A was allowed by their parents to eat independently: holding a spoon and chopsticks on their own, handling their own bowl of noodles. Although clumsy, with noodles flying everywhere, they were focused and creative in figuring out how to get the slippery noodles and large meat pieces into their mouth.
Child B, on the other hand, had everything pre-cut by their mother and only used a spoon. They ate in a distracted state turning here and there, asking mom for water, requesting mom to pick out this and that – and everything on the table was neat and tidy.
If you asked Child A to describe their bowl of noodles, he would be able to clearly explain it inside and out because they had truly experienced it.
What Child A gained didn’t come from any specific lesson, but from self-practice, a vivid real-life experience. However, in my class, only about 5% of parents let their children do things independently. The majority still hold the mindset of “cleanliness and incapability” – which results in 5-year-olds still being spoon-fed to avoid spills and mess. And if they do get messy, they are subjected to harmful shouting from parents during the meal.
It’s like teaching a child to draw a straight line, at first, the line is shaky and crooked. But with repeated practice, it becomes straighter.
Thinking works the same way. Without real-life experience from a young age, when entering a creative environment like university, students often only know how to piece together what already exists, working one-dimensionally (mostly through visuals), lacking flexibility and internal motivation. The result is that many art and creative students end up working by copying, and then anxiously search for evidence to see if… they have plagiarized.
I’ve even witnessed cases where teachers did assignments on behalf of students so that they could get higher grades.
From this experience, I believe the book “the mindset of Sand Bubbler Crab” (The Mind of Sisyphean Thinking) should be widely shared among elementary school teachers and parents – especially in grades 1 and 2.
If these seeds are sown early, then by the time students reach high school or university, they will have preserved an inherent SYSTEMATIC THINKING FRAMEWORK within themselves – instead of being molded and overprotected by their parents
