Division + Assimilation & Accommodation.



Today, as 5 of us went home on the train after class, someone took out this flyer and was just commenting how this shop - Manhatten Fish Market was not operating yet, even though they had sent out the flyers. We were just browsing through the promotions and came upon this page. I commented that we could go have lunch using this offer after Saturday's class. Someone else brought up that this was for a group of 4, there are 5 of us.  It did not say it was a group of 4, it just said Groupie Special, although they showed 4 drinks, we could order an extra drink and share the 4 main courses among the 5 of us or order another, since we are different individuals, we eat different amounts or have different preferences. 

This scenario made me think back of two points in class today, not totally related though.

1. Although we were not talking about equal portions in this case, this made us bring up what was mentioned in class earlier - people or money as groups should not be used for the earlier stages of grouping with children, as it is a harder concept to visualise. Dr. Yeap mentioned that division is not sharing equally. This is where language plays a part. If I had 6 muffins and I wanted to give 3 friends equal amounts, I could just give them 1 each and they will have equal amounts. While division means taking the 6 muffins and dividing it among the 3 friends, where each will get 2 muffins. 

2. 

In the earlier scenario, we employed accommodation. We would use new information to form new schema and change the ideas to fit the realities of the external objects. If we share our preferences and the amount of food we can eat, with that we are able to accommodate to the differences. We could order an extra side dish, extra drink, extra set meal, a variety of options are available. 

Piaget believed that the process of thinking and the intellectual development could be regarded as an extension of the biological process of the evolutionary adaptation of the species, which has also two on-going processes: assimilation and accommodation. 
Source - Stangor (6.2) Infancy and Childhood: Exploring and Learning