Hard to “sitcomisize”
I am now mentoring home-schoolers in California over Skype. We talk twice a week and explore various topics. Many of the learners attend Grounded by Nature, an outdoor learning program focused on nurturing a deep, integrated understanding and relationship with the larger natural world. Many of my explorations with the learners are inspired by their work on the ground. Through our explorations we cover most if not all grade-level academic skills.
This week, the group at Grounded by Nature is starting to conceptualize and build a wetland habitat. This got us wondering about habitats and the complex relationships that are integral to them. Inspired by this, I invited the learners to explore the relationship of humans to their habitat. To get us grounded in this discussion, we have now turned our attetion to early human habitats. After watching a PBS documentary on early humans, I asked the learners what surprised them the most. Their independent responses were the exact same. They were most surprised by how one archaeologist took 7 years to take the sandstone off a single fossil. The learners were in awe of the patience, endurance and persistence of the archaeologist. We lingered on this idea of patience and perseverence. Together, we pondered what it means to stay with one idea, one exploration, one pursuit for so long. I shared with the learners Gladwell's revelation of 10,000 hours of practice — how it takes those many hours to master any skill.
This has got me thinking about long-duration learning — learning that truly lasts a life-time sometimes. As I think back on my own learning experiences, I am struck by how some of my most deeply internalized learning lasted years on end. I remember learning some of my greatest social skills on the playground, navigating tricky situations for the first 15 or so years of my life. Then there was swimming — while I learned the basic skills quickly, I only became a skilled swimmer after 10 years of weekly practice. It was a slow process … with every experience, every tangent along the way, my learning got deeper, more nuanced.
Dan Meyer talks about this in his TED talk on Math. He mentions how daily lessons in classrooms have become "sitcomisized" — everything covered in 22 minute segments — start to end with a formula at the end to get through a test. He lures us away from such learning to consider how deeper, more nuanced learning takes a long time, many different perspectives, much struggle, many ups and downs and times of lonely work.
I wonder how we can create the space and time for our children to stay with a topic, to linger, to dig in, to go deep, to struggle, to let the topic grow with them as they grow. How do we do this in the face of life as we know it — in an age of instant changes, instant information, instant gratification? I wonder where my exploration with the Grounded by Nature learners is going to take us … we did agree on one thing .. that like evolution, we are going to let this topic take as long as it needs to. One cannot possible understand something so nuanced and slow as the evolution of early humans in a 22 minute period.