<POEM><AUTHOR><FNAME>William</FNAME><SURNAME>Blake</SURNAME></AUTHOR><POEMLINE>To see the world in a Grain of Sand</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>And a Heaven in a Wildflower</POEMLINE></POEM>
Mr. Levy, a dictator is just like being in the fourth square in Four Square.Watching the water evaporate reminded me of watching the clock. I always try to see the minute hand move, but I can never see it. I knew the water was evaporating, but I couldn't see it go.—4th grade students
The more we learn about learning, the more we understand the significance of making connections. In Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen (1998) describes how the process of making connections allows us to solve problems. Even on a biological level, "intelligence" relates to the number of synaptic connections between brain cells. Jensen expresses his thrill at conversing with Buckminster Fuller, a man who was overflowing with abundant associations: "Nearly everything reminded him of nearly everything else" (p. 92). Similarly, William Ayers writes, I no longer believe the old saying that you can learn something from anything. I now think, given the intense relationships and connections that exist everywhere, that you can learn everything from anything. (1993, p. 86) How do I prepare my students to converse with people like Fuller? Can I teach them how to learn everything from anything? Where will they develop the vision to see worlds in grains of sand and heavens in wildflowers?
The Gift of ADD
My wife, Joanna, a 3rd grade teacher, was expecting a new student with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). The parents gave her a book about ADD, Driven to Distraction (Hallowell & Ratey, 1995), to help her understand Maria's behavior. But what astonished Joanna was that page after page described—with uncanny perception—all the eccentricities that she never understood . . . about me.
I grabbed the book and eagerly read it so that I could refute her suspicions. But instead, I felt as if the authors had observed and recorded my every behavior. They described the constant movement of some parts of the body, the inability to finish many projects, and various minor obsessions. More subtle were the descriptions of conversations that I thought I had had with my wife, which turned out to have happened only in my head. Then there were the bizarre symptoms: starting but not finishing sentences, being unable to find the right word, and blurting out something that made no sense: "Could you please close the . . . hamburger?" My family has learned to interpret; they shut the refrigerator door. Or I might stare blankly when someone asks a question. People wonder: Am I thinking? Did I hear them? Am I in a coma? Other times, everything is "quick" with me. When my son spilled gasoline on himself, I frantically shouted, "Quick! No one light a match!"
Memory Connections
One fascinating part of the book described how the minds of people like us work. For example, if you catch us off guard with a question, our information-retrieval system can freeze up; we cannot locate the appropriate section in our "memory drawers" and pull out the right file. Instead, we have to dump the whole file cabinet onto the table. Then we look over the contents to find the answer.
"How old are you, Mr. Levy?" I wasn't ready for that one. Had I had that birthday yet? I emptied the file cabinet onto the table of my mind and looked for clues: the blindfolded car ride to the restaurant and those magic tricks from my daughter. I must have had that birthday.
The files provide clues to get to the information. But when we see images of our memory scattered across our table, something else happens. We make interesting connections. That might be what I do while my wife waits 20 minutes for me to answer what time we should pick up our daughter from her piano lesson. That might be what your student is doing when you ask a seemingly simple question and he stares blankly as if he has never seen you before. A linear thinker who can zip right to the proper file might never explore the relationships of a multitude of data and experiences stored in the records of the mind and heart.
Understanding
Of course, you don't have to have ADD to make connections. We teach students new concepts by connecting them to something that they already know. The kindergartner experiences subtraction when he loses a tooth. The 4th grader joins the club of explorers when she ventures into the woods alone. The kicker on the high school football team meets the parabola when he judges his punt for hang time or distance. As Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) wrote, The child interprets the age of chivalry by going through his own age of chivalry, the age of maritime adventure by going through similar miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world he has the same key. (P. 155)
An essential step in lesson planning is imagining what experience the students already have. If they lack experience, we need to create it for them before we can teach them. Experience forms the vessel for the concept to fill. Connecting the concept to the experience is at the heart of understanding.
Meaning
Making connections gives meaning to our lives. In All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1993), Robert Fulghum connects the lessons that he learned in kindergarten to the issues and challenges he faces as an adult. More recently, in Values of the Game (1998), Bill Bradley connects what he learned on the basketball court to what he needs to succeed in life.
I am writing an article about swing dance. It won't be called "Everything I Learned About Teaching and Learning, I Learned Swing Dancing," but that's the idea. When my Expeditionary Learning colleagues took me swing dancing in Cincinnati, I experienced how hard it is for the body to learn something new. My first dance teacher's well-intended instructions left me paralyzed and shamed. (How often do I do that to my students?) I learned that I need to get away from her and practice by myself in the corner. (Do I give the students and teachers with whom I work a chance to do that?) I learned that I need a trusted friend to help me try something new on the dance floor. (Do students and teachers have such mentors?) The great dancers on the floor inspired me. (Did they break the rules or incorporate them so invisibly that the basic steps were unrecognizable?)
When I share my teaching in workshops, do other teachers look at me in the same way that I look at the dancers? (Inspiring, but how do you get there?) What is the relationship between the "steps" and the "dance"? You could learn all the steps and never really dance. Can you teach the dance without the steps? What is the "dance" and what are the "steps" in teaching? In reading? In any performance?
Making meaning has to do with finding the connections between our personal experience and the universal issues.
Humpty Dumpty in Our School System
Unfortunately, our school system is not organized to make connections. Knowledge is divided into discrete subjects. The day is divided into fixed periods. Every discipline has national, state, and local associations that establish rigorous frameworks and standards. Many districts have system coordinators of math, reading, science, social studies, physical education, and the arts. Each promotes its own agenda, competing for time and space. Teachers are left feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. The standards describe important goals, but we would need an additional four hours in the school day to reach them.
Schools fragment subject content and daily schedules into ever-smaller pieces. The integrity of the curriculum, like Humpty Dumpty, has had a great fall. I wait for the king's men, the different subject coordinators, to sit down together and think about the curriculum in an integrated way. Wouldn't many of their goals overlap? Wouldn't they find natural connections between science and language arts or between reading and social studies? But all the king's men have taken only a piece of Humpty and built their own kingdom on it.
Putting Humpty Back Together
I don't necessarily want to abolish individual disciplines; they provide rich traditions of how we think about the world and useful ways of organizing knowledge and skills. But they are abstractions. Life is not divided into subjects. Our experience of life is not mathematical, scientific, or artistic, but an integrated whole.
Every time I introduce abstractions to my students without connecting them to concrete experience, I create the potential for misunderstanding. Students need to see the connection of the whole to its parts and to understand that there are no subjects in life, just as there are no lines in nature. We see lines where one color or form meets another. We see subjects when we reflect on our experiences from different points of view.
From Experience to Subjects
Experience is always the beginning, but it is also only the beginning. We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience. Different subjects originate from different points of view. I want to help my students develop a habit of reflection to mine meaning and understanding from whatever experiences they encounter.
- Mathematics: What is there to count and measure? "Number lieth in all things." Counting and measuring require the development of a language of units and relationships, and they compel us to invent technologies to measure and record them.
- Science: What are the variables? This question launches scientific investigation. We must first identify the variables and then experiment to see what happens when we change them. As we learn the importance of observing, predicting, recording, and analyzing results to form theories, we learn the scientific method.
- Reading: Have others had this experience? What did they learn? The desire to know others' experience is the natural origin of reading. If others have experienced something, we want to know what they found. If we can't talk to them directly, we can read about it.
- Language and creative arts: What do I want to communicate to others about my experience? We have learned something ourselves. The inherent impulse behind language arts is to communicate to others what we have experienced. This question opens the door to writing and other artistic representations as we interpret our experience for others.
- Social studies: What have I learned about myself and my society? Everything we experience should teach us something about ourselves and our society. When we study plants, we learn something about ourselves. When we learn spelling, we learn something about our society.
- Connections: How is this experience related to others that I have had? This question prompts us to discover relationships among our own experiences and across the disciplines. Here we learn to converse with Buckminster Fuller, to see worlds in grains of sand, to understand teaching and learning at the Swing Lounge.
Whatever we begin with, I regularly have my students practice raising these questions. I want them to understand the natural origins of the subjects that they study. I want them to develop the habits of asking questions as they reflect on their own experience.
Project Design
The six questions can also provide a framework for designing projects. For example, I challenge my 4th grade class to find out where a loaf of bread comes from. They plant wheat on a small plot adjacent to the school. We start with the experience of growing wheat.
What is there to count and measure? We measure how deep to plant the seeds, how long they take to germinate, how tall they grow, and how many wheat berries each stalk produces. We calculate the perimeter to build a fence and the area to buy the right amount of fertilizer. We measure the temperature, the water, the flour that we grind, and the time and ingredients that it takes to bake a loaf of bread.
What are the variables? Students identify variables that might affect the wheat: the type of soil, the origin of the seeds, the different kinds of fertilizer. They design and perform experiments to determine how to ensure the highest yield.
What have others communicated about this experience? We read books about farming history and methods, about tractors and combines. We read accounts of pioneers and settlers taming the plains with plows. We look at paintings inspired by the workers in the field or by the satisfying beauty of the harvest.
What do we want to communicate about our experience? Each student produces a book of writing and illustrations. We record results of our scientific experiments to pass on to future wheat farmers. We produce a musical play that tells the story of wheat, from plowing the fields to baking the bread.
What do we learn about ourselves and our place in society? Giant farms that are run by big business make it impossible for the family farmer to compete. Chemical fertilizers can produce a rich crop in a short time but have disastrous long-term effects on the soil. We learn about our responsibility to serve the community as we give loaves of bread to others in school. Perhaps most important, we are aware of our extraordinary interdependence: How many people make it possible for us to find a fresh loaf of bread at the supermarket? We learn about our obligation to future generations when, the following September, students present the wheat that they grew to the new class. Recognition of our interdependence awakens our sense of gratitude.
What other experiences does the wheat remind us of? Wheat is rich in metaphor: reaping, sowing, preparing fertile soil, producing, separating the wheat from the chaff, and serving others with the fruit of our labors. We see how the plant sacrifices the lower leaves when it produces the fruit, and how the seed must die and be buried in the ground to produce more fruit. We notice how the plant is structured with "barbed swords" and "walled cities" to protect the precious seed from intruders. Our daily observations include writing a simile or a metaphor about wheat. Several years after taking my class, one student reflected on the connections: "Mr. Levy would ask a question about wheat and about life all in the same sentence."
Learning Happens
The way that students experience the curriculum is as important as the content. To students, it appears to happen naturally. They don't know that we are following the prescribed program of our district or the packaged frameworks of our state. Rather, one activity simply leads to the next.
We find rocks in the ground and then study how scientists determine what kind of rock it is. We learn area because we need to buy the right amount of manure, and perimeter because we need to build a fence. We crush the wheat with stones to produce flour, then rejoice at the advantage of a hand grinder. What makes the grinder so efficient? We take it apart and discover a lever, a wheel, a wedge, a screw. Suddenly, we are studying simple machines. We read books about colonial life and how colonials produced food. We write and illustrate everything that we do.
My students do not know that the 4th grade curriculum is rocks and minerals, simple machines, colonial life, math, and language arts. They simply experience, reflect from different points of view, ask questions, find answers, explore, and solve problems. This is learning for life.
Habits of Mind
I want to help my students take any situation and understand it in a way that relates to the larger issues. I want them to find the universal in the particular, to discover metaphors that connect personal experience to the struggles of humankind, to see worlds in grains of sands and heavens in wildflowers. This kind of vision will prepare them to lead fulfilling lives in whatever occupation they choose or in whatever circumstances they find themselves. They will look at anything and discover the deep and broad connections that weave the threads of the story that unite to the web of the world. Whatever my students become, I want them to see through their local experiences of accounting, carpentry, managing a business, or maintaining motorcycles, to the universal experience of what it means to be a human being.
