The Summer Slide

As a former teacher, one of the recurring conversations in the teacher lounge was “How much the kids would forget over the summer”. In the fall, they would spend weeks getting their kids back on track. Some felt that year-round schooling was the answer. Why do kids need time off when we are no longer an agricultural society that needed kids on the farm? That’s a valid question if you believe the classroom is the primary place where learning happens. After years of college, training to be a teacher, it’s hard not to see life that way.

Even though I went through all that training, lately I have been seriously re-evaluating how kids learn. As I watch kids play at Discovery park, I know that mixed in with the joy and excitement, there is a tremendous amount of learning happening. There aren’t any tests and no one is trying to figure out exactly what they are learning – but they are learning.

Maybe they are thinking about the physics of the merry-go-round that wobbles.

Maybe they are enamored with the goats or are carrying a chicken around for an hour.

I’ve seen kids looking under the train cars, studying how they work and flipping the track switch back and forth as they trace the rail paths.

These are the experiences they will remember because they are figuring it out themselves. It’s not in a picture book. Experiencing the fullness of life is the real, permanent learning adventure. A book, a screen, a whiteboard, cannot compare to the real thing.

For example, reading or watching a video about frogs is one thing. Catching and holding a frog is real. Feel it’s skin, watch it breathe, study it’s feet.

This morning I experienced this for myself. I picked up a painted turtle in the driveway. I looked at it carefully first. I’m not going to pick up a snapper turtle. I took him over to our pond and set him down about a foot away.

Several observations:

Of course, turtles aren’t known to fly, so when I picked him up, he got so scared that he immediately peed all over my pants. I had never thought about turtle pee and poop.
His feet had long, sharp claws even though they are very short feet.
When I put him down, he poked his head out and saw the water. He scrambled faster than I could have imagined as he dove into the pond. So much for the slow turtle concept. It must have been about the motivation.
I wondered how old he was and is there a way to tell.
And finally I have been calling him a “him”. Maybe it was a her. How can you tell? And how do turtles “do it”?

In my view, this is real learning. I probably won’t forget today’s encounter with a simple turtle.