schoolyard subversion

2000-11-15 [< * >]

When we HEAR material, we retain only 10% of it.
When we SEE, we retain 20%.
When we SEE and HEAR, we retain 40%.
When we TALK, SEE, and HEAR, we retain 70%.
And when we DO, SEE, and HEAR, we retain 90%.
- How Much Do We Remember?, Charter Performance Group, Inc (courtesy of Russell Schwartz)

School was a painful drone. On and on it went, with no end in sight. It was almost as bad as TV, being fed facts -- not learning them. But there was an end in sight: next week there would be a break. "Interim Week", it was called. A week to break out of the confines of school and do something in real life. The teachers provide a number of different "proposals" for the students to choose from. They ranged from everything from a trip to Korea, to a tour of our very own backyard -- Chicago. Some stayed at school to view and critique movies. I had chosen to practice improvisation at the famed Second City.

While I won't go into the actual details of my trip, I will mention that it was a lot of fun, and a welcome break from a monotony of school. Every teacher I spoke with praised the Interim program, praising its educational benefits and heralding it as one of the greatest benefits of our school. I agree. And to them, I ask a simple question: Why not interim all year round?

Of course, it would not be an "interim" as such -- but it would be school, and it would be educational. Likely much more so than school is now. It would also cut down on the costs of school -- in fact much of the school building could be eliminated. Who needs computers when the students are actually out in the world? If school is meant to be training for life, what better training could there be than to experience life itself -- in all its glory.

A while back, my mother and I had discussed an idea for home schooling: a mobile school, where we would travel the country visiting famous landmarks to learn about life and history where it takes place. As one of my teachers said: you cannot truly understand a place until you've been there.

The incredible book "A Pattern Language" discusses this on a smaller town scale. In pattern 85, "Shopfront Schools" it claims "[t]he right setting for a child is the community itself, just as the right setting for an infant learning to speak is his own home."

It also quotes an incredible passage from "Moboc: The Mobile Open Classroom" in which the author takes his students for a day in the park. Playing among the trees, the students soon try and find ways to measure them. In the process they make an amazing discovery: the magic number Pi. As the author says, "I [wanted] to make sure the concept of Pi didn't disappear into the obscurity of abstract mathematics. I know that I didn't really understand Pi until I got to college, despite an excellent math program in high school. But for those...kids...Pi is something real; it "lives" in trees and telephone polls."

I don't think even I truly understand Pi, despite having done a Science Fair project on the various ways to calculate it. There is an immense difference between seeing things in the cold clinical light of the lecture or textbook, and experiencing them in bright glow of the real world. Actual experience makes a mark that is hard to erase.

The benefits of actual experience are so clear, and so real. We demonstrate them year after year at our own school with the effectiveness of the interim program. So I leave my teachers, and all teachers, with a challenge: Dare to throw down the textbook and leave the classroom. Dare to experience life itself. Dare to live, so that your students may too. For without life, and life experience, you leave us nothing to look forward to but death. Is that really the lesson you want your students to take away?

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