Sunday, March 29, 2009

A Tiny Shard of Earth...

One of the reasons I love stories is that metaphors let us move about flexibly within a larger framework of an idea. It is this need for flexibility and depth that causes me to wrestle with NCLB and its climate which makes teachers focus on discrete facts and skills.

While in philosophy I believe that we can teach a child everything s/he needs to know to pass those all important measures by focusing on the big picture, I am also very aware that a child doesn't have the capacity to know that he knows something if the words which surround it are not familiar.

For example, I watched the children, intent as they were, learning how to take a plant from its pot and place it at the proper depth and distance from another plant. They were all equally focused, equally eager, equally engaged and they were learning something they would never forget because it involved them wholly. In education we often refer to the many different learning styles - auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and more - with which a child experiences the world and knowing! The garden involved them all.


But suppose they encounter a question on the test using words they do not know to describe this particular activity. They will have no way to demonstrate mastery! This is the difficulty teachers face as they divide up their year into small bits of time in which they will teach small bits of information, or small skills. If I am not mistaken there are more standards than there is time to teach them in 3rd grade (and probably 4th as well). And now we have heard that next year 2nd graders are to memorize their multiplication tables! (Audible sigh goes here)

For these reasons I am not surprised to find that not all the teachers are rushing to be involved during school hours with the planting of a garden. It is why we planted the garden during spring break -- which meant that only a few kids got to have this wonderful experience!

So I pick up and place this shard of earth-colored glass in my stained glass window which grows every so slowly to make something positive of the broken glass. You see, despite the odds Westmeade now has a garden..... To see more pictures of the garden go to http://www.westmeadees.mnps.org/Page53162.aspx

1 comment:

Ghostlibrarian said...

Thank you for an excellent example of how much children can learn but still continue to test poorly. We have some kind of test every single quarter and I'm sick to death of them.