There are two basic types of human thinking: one is logic-analytical thinking or mathematical logic, and the other is artistic thinking or image thinking. This classification made by Pavlov, a great physiologist, is of great significance for solving children's intellectual education problems and cultivating children's talents and hobbies. The author suggests: Gather your future first-year students, choose a sunny September day, and take them to the Woods in autumn, and you will immediately find these two completely different thinking types of children. Woods, especially in early autumn, always attract children's attention, and children can't be indifferent on such occasions. Where there is excitement, admiration and surprise, there is logical and emotional understanding of the surrounding world, that is, rational and perceptual understanding. The blue and far-reaching sky, colorful trees, open spaces in the forest and bright colors in early autumn in the depths of the dense forest all attract children's attention. Through such activities, you will find that some children are obsessed with all the harmonious beauty of nature. They don't listen to the individual's voice, and they don't distinguish the details of the individual from the world around them. But when their attention is attracted by something or a phenomenon, then for them, all harmony is focused on this thing and phenomenon. For example, he noticed a bunch of wild roses covered with amber berries and silvery dew, so he could see nothing except this bunch of wild roses. For him, the whole beautiful world only exists in this natural creation, which is the most prominent feature of artistic perception or image perception of the surrounding world. Children with this kind of perception can tell what they see with great interest and have obvious performance. They often encounter great difficulties in learning mathematics, and sometimes they can't keep up with the progress of this subject.
For other children, there seems to be no harmony of beauty, as if all this beauty has never touched him. He has been asking: why does the sun turn red when it is about to set? Where does the sun hide at night? Why do autumn leaves turn red, orange and yellow? Why do the leaves of oak trees stay green until the first cold? In front of such a child, the first thing to show is not the image of the world, but its logical and causal side. This is logic-analytical thinking, or mathematical thinking. Children with this kind of thinking can easily find the causal relationship and dependence of things and grasp a group of things and phenomena with their thinking. They are more abstract, and they are interested in learning mathematics and other precise sciences. For them, logical analysis of abstract things is extremely interesting.
These two kinds of thinking are objective. We should know which type is dominant for each child. This is extremely important to correctly guide mental work from pedagogy. Students should be taught to think and develop their thinking, that is to say, two areas of thinking should be developed in each child, namely, the field of thinking in images and the field of logical-analytical thinking. We should not give them one-sided development, but be good at guiding each student's intellectual development to the track that is most suitable for their innate quality. The author's point of view is theoretical and instructive to our work, but in practical teaching, especially for children in grade one and grade two, their thinking is not very clear, but as teachers in grade one and grade two, it is necessary to understand this.
Children's thinking is also different in the progress of operation. Some children are very active in thinking. When they just thought about how bees collect pollen, the teacher pointed out the complex structure of flowers to him, so their thoughts could easily be transferred to another object. Or take the thinking situation when solving arithmetic application problems as an example: such students can grasp everything in the application conditions at once: there are baskets, apples and fruit trees. Other students have completely different ideas. If a child's attention is focused on one thing, it is difficult for him to shift to other things. When he thinks deeply about one thing, he forgets other things. When he thinks about the price per kilogram of apples, he will forget how many kilograms there are in each basket of apples and how many baskets there are. Teachers sometimes make mistakes and mistakenly think that this thinking feature is an abnormal state of intellectual development. In fact, both children with visual thinking and children with obvious logical-analytical thinking often have the phenomenon of slow intellectual process. Teachers often make completely wrong and premature conclusions about children's intellectual development because they don't understand what is going on. The misunderstanding of some children whose thinking process is obviously slow is particularly distressing. These children are often very clever and alert, but their thinking is slow, which causes the teacher's dissatisfaction. Therefore, the child is very nervous, and his thoughts are numb. In the end, he can't accept anything.
We should know these characteristics of children before they go to school, because it is easiest to study their thinking characteristics before they start learning. I suggest that if your child is about to enter school, you'd better take him to nature as much as possible for him to appreciate and experience, and you can also observe, analyze and understand.