SAST

Andrew taught our FHE lesson today, hoping to teach the children about how "small and simple things" are what make great things happen. He showed the kids some slides of "expectations v. reality" Cake Fails, some primitive and elaborate Minecraft houses, a score by Beethoven and one of Miriam's very first scores, and so forth. In short, he was trying to connect to each of the kids through their hobbies, so that they could (hopefully) understand that mastering the basics and then tackling harder things (one step at a time) were what would lead them to accomplish things.

He even put up a picture of one of my textbooks this semester—Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks because she also breaks things down into little tasks (that will hopefully feel manageable once I complete them all). 

Eventually the kids picked up on what he was saying and guessed Alma 37:6 (which was the very scripture he had in mind). 

He'd even designed a little needlepoint for everyone to do, so that we could see how so many simple stitches come together to create something beautiful. But it takes patience and exactness and...

Anyway, the little piece he designed was just a rectangle with the letters SAST on it—standing for "small and simple things." 

The opening screen of his slideshow proclaimed SAST, so the kids were already curious about it when they walked in the room and were guessing what it might mean. Soon after they figured out it meant "small and simple things," Andrew put a slide on with a link to Karen Rinaldi's research on...well...suckiness.

Her book is called (It's Great) To Suck At Something, but he had a slide up with a snippet from some New York Times article (by the same title as her book), proclaiming the benefits of just...starting at the beginning of things and messing up and trying again—and trying new things, even if you know you're going to...suck...because trying new things is good. 

I don't know. I haven't read the book (and I'm not sure Andrew has either), but his point was that there's research out there showing that when people start new things, they're often not very good at it...and that's okay! Because that's...where you start learning stuff.

Anyway, everyone was very excited that SAST could mean either "small and simple things" or "suck at some-thing" because...that's how we roll.