Catch and Release in Inquiry

Here is the spoiler alert – this blog has a fishing story and a several fishing metaphors. Beware.

Soon after some of my first experiences teaching, I became aware of the fact that engaged students were way easier to “manage” (a nice term related to classroom control) than disinterested ones. This is not rocket science. Finding the right hook for lessons became one of my teaching goals.

I have a story to tell about hooks. It goes far back into my childhood. I lived at two different times in the idyllic foothills of southwest Alberta. Whenever I return to that landscape, I breathe differently and all the tension leaves my shoulders. This has been a fascinating personal observation since some of those years were filled with turmoil in my family. It has often caused me to reflect on the deep sources of resiliency found in a natural environment.  

Both of my Dad’s parents liked to fish. For my grandfather, George Shenton, I am confident it came from his childhood roots in the pastoral English countryside near Bollington, although he never told me that. I went with him to the cold, stony rushing little stream near our home at Twin Butte on several occasions. I suspect, I was allowed to go to get me out of the way of the afore mentioned turmoil, but at 9 or 10 I don’t remember caring about the why.

I did learn several life lessons from fishing.

Throwing stones in a stream does not make fishermen happy.

Fishing time is not really talking time. While my grandpa could spin a tale, he never did it when he was fishing. 

If you catch it, you must clean it. Soon after my first fish gutting session, I discovered I could set-up my line with a weight and no hook and stand and cast and reel in and watch the birds and shadows and slowly walk the edge of the stream and claim bad luck for not catching a thing. I assumed (for a few years) that my Grandpa was none the wiser to my ploy. Then one year on a family visit back to Pincher Creek in my mid-teens my deception was revealed during a story telling session, much to my embarrassment.  He had known all along. Only recently, as a grandparent did I really get it – but that is a different tale.

Back to the nature of hooks. Musicians have understood the use of a good hook, something to catch a listener’s attention and bring them back time and again to the lyric or melody. I have never heard a composer apologize for using a good tonal hook. All those related ideas like bait and lures just remind me that shiny, colourful, invitingly textured, intriguingly sounding, delicious smelling and all things food related can be used to draw a student’s attention. It is best for a good hook to be multi-faceted since learners can be a diverse lot, very unlike the schools of the fish species.

The powerful part of a good hook in learning, from hockey to animals to good literature is what happens after landing that learner. Release before death by boredom, I hope. After drawing them in, using the focus and attention to go deeper and plant some seed (sorry to muddy the water by mixing the metaphor but could not resist an agriculture reference) it is throwing them back. How do I facilitate the successful, independent integration of that fact, skill, concept or idea? Often, it is just trusting that the flow of the stream will carry them on to the next bend wiser.

Just recently, I met a former student. She was 6 when I had her in Grade 1. She is a charming 30 something nurse in Vancouver, now. She told me things she remembers clearly from all those years ago. Some of them are only shadows for me. You can never tell what will actually stick. It is so gratifying to know that somethings do.

Catch and release.

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

Something incredibly wonderful happened to me this week. I met Frank Oppenheimer.

He said some things that spoke to my soul from years of observing kids in rich learning environments:

“The Exploratorium was conceived as a place to teach and learn, primarily because these are things we all like to do. It is the way we bring up our children, take our friends to the top of a hill to see the view, or call out, when we are walking through the woods ‘Hey, look, there’s a deer.’”

“This show of reality represents a basic honesty that is surprisingly important effect on learning.”

“No one flunks a museum.”

There is a stack of books from the library that I am working my summer way through. Summer reading was one of my all time most restorative activities during my active teaching time. I did not consider the summer break well started until I had spent at least a few days that first week nose deep in a novel from breakfast until supper or even lights out bedtime.

When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally request the removal of my nose from a book to get something done. During my university days, I reread The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings each year during my summer job bus commutes. Then I taught for 8 years before starting my family and so I had time to create a July tradition around summer reading. Family changed some aspects of this (no more dawn to dusk reading) but this summer I have reveled in it in a new way.

In late July, my husband got a total knee replacement and I had hospital and home time to spend nose deep in books again.

In the early 1990’s my husband and I enjoyed the opportunity to visit San Francisco for a conference related to his work. I checked out Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and discovered the Exploratorium. I could not believe such a wonderful learning environment existed. I tried to get there every time we went to San Francisco and have recommended it to many people as a highlight of a trip there. We planned a family holiday to San Francisco expressly so my kids could experience it. When I discovered a biography of the man who “made up” this rich world I knew I had to read it.

In the pages of Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens; Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up I found a kindred spirit in Frank Oppenheimer. Biographer, K.C. Cole has communicated her “perceptions” of this physics and education genius so that I feel I truly “understand” his life and times. Perception and understanding were key to Frank’s educational approach. Cole had the advantage of working with Frank over many years and experienced the development of the Exploratorium first hand in the role of a writer. She had contact with him right up to his death from cancer in 1985.

Her description of Frank’s early life, his experiences related to work as a young physicist on the Manhattan Project with his more famous brother Robert, his eventual blacklist for his stand (with the scientists involved) on not using the bomb which included suggestions for international atomic energy oversight and his eventual high school teaching job in Colorado all lead to understanding the cosmic synergy he brought to the development of his “woods of natural phenomena”.

Frank’s science was a life philosophy, a way of looking at the world and wanting to know more. Knowing more could only lead to better people and society. In his view there were no stupid questions and ultimately with time to touch, listen and observe, patterns were revealed, connections made and looking for answers brought understanding.

Farming in the City

When my Mom and Dad moved into the town of Airdrie from the small farm they had been on for twenty some years out by Irricana, my twenty-something daughter began to fret. I never lived on that farm. I visited it lots but my Dad was an oilman and when I was growing up we spent lots of time following the rigs in a mobile home. We often returned to our family roots in Pincher Creek where my uncles and aunts farmed and ranched. As Dad brokered his years of experience as a rough neck into more responsible positions we found ourselves in Calgary and Edmonton. Then just as I entered my last year of university Dad's work took them to back Calgary and he fulfilled his dream of his own land. On the acreage they bought, they settled to raise my younger siblings, Brown Swiss cattle and allowed my horse-mad sister to purchase a paint horse to show.

"How will my kids ever learn all the things we did, Mom? Do you think my cousin, Leanne, will marry a farmer?" My daughter already had her sights set on a fine young man who was city raised in Calgary and she has always had the ability to take a long view and worry about it. She and her brother spent idyllic times "on the farm" riding horses, pulling weeds, stacking bales and floating down the irrigation canal while actually growing up in the city.

So next weekend, we will do our best to get my grand-daughter to a farm. The last couple weeks Anisha has been snacking on the ripening tomatoes we planted seeds for this past February and her Aunt Jenn brought raspberries in from her parents garden out by Stony Plain. But I think we would enjoy a bus ride in the country to see and taste out "on the farm".

Sunday, August 26, GEA, Live Local (handling ticket sales) and Northlands (where you can park and catch the tour bus) are teaming up to get folks out to our exceptional growing lands with an event called Farming in the City. North-east Edmonton is home to a large valuable area of fertile land with a fascinating micro-climate. The event promises some history (one of my favorite parts of tours) and the opportunity of a sensory experience to help connect us with our food roots (could not resist that little pun).

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

One of the biggest rewards of getting kids (or anybody) out of the box or away from the screen is just how absolutely brain filling smelling, touching, tasting, seeing and hearing can be.

My grand-daughter and I went to the Ex this afternoon. No matter what they rename it, that’s what it will be for me because that is how old I am. So in Name Your Fair I have voted for…… wait for it ….. The Edmonton Exhibition. You can go and vote yourself (just do it by July 29).

My primary objective was to share Fred Penner with her. We listen to a CD of his LOTS and our two favorite songs are The Cat Came Back and Happy Feet (a wonderful 1930’s song which I like to imagine inspiring an animated movie about a dancing penguin). He performed them bothJ He also sang A House is a House for Me; the lyrics come from one of my all time favorite children’s books for looking at the world creatively.

  

Before Fred’s show, my grand-daughter and I shared a trip through the Farm at the children’s area. She got to put on a denim apron and carried a bucket with real feed corn. To be honest (she gets this tendency from her mom) she spent most of her time picking up spilled corn from wherever she spotted it.

That is the great part about real stuff. When surrounded by it, You can find something that interests You wherever You look.

Her favorite part was when we reached the Save On Foods’ sponsored store at the end. We were given a shopping list and on it was macaroni and cheese, one of her favorites! Now I am pretty sure that she has not yet started making a connection between the stuff we saw in the barns, the stamps in her little booklet and her food. She is after all only 21 months old. But we had lots to talk about and it was fun.

We saw and smelled some real pigs. We love the story the Three Little Pigs.

We talked about cows making milk and shared some ice cream. We love ice cream.

We looked into each other eyes when Fred Penner began Happy Feet, smiled and started moving our “ten little tapping toes”. We love dancing to that song.

There is nothing like the real thing baby for making connections.

(Absolutely could not resist that Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell link)

One of my Beliefs about Learning

Just the other day, Edna Sackson asked me (well, not just me but anyone reading or following her blog) what my beliefs were about learning. This morning, as my husband and I learned about how a preadmission clinic works (lots of sitting and waiting for 10 minute spurts with different experts on what will happen), I wrote this blog. When I came home to type it up I went to my trusty on-line Oxford English Dictionary (I fell in love with the OED after reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, a great example of how truth can be ever so much more fascinating than fiction) and discovered that apart from the definition of learning 1(a): “the action of receiving instruction or acquiring knowledge”; its root was in an old Germanic word that meant teaching.

I am spending a lot of time these days with my toddler grand-daughter who reminds me more than once every day about the basics of learning: touching, smelling, listening, looking at and tasting new things until you know them. I noticed in one of Edna’s old blogs she feels there is a lot to find out about learning from children.

One of my strongest beliefs about learning is that human brains are hard-wired to learn and doing just that, constantly.

I believe the sensory processes that allow the in-put of data, the exotic synapse system that lays down hundreds of connections for later reference and a complex neural network to facilitate response occur much of the time without the human actually trying to learn. I am sure I am not the only educator who often lost track of these brain facts while trying to push my particular agenda of what I wanted a child to learn.

When I was in my last year of high school, my Chemistry teacher gave us copies of the last 5 years’ worth of “Provincial Departmental” multiple choice exams. The score on a similar exam that we would write at course end would provide 80% of our final mark. Unlike my first 2 years of high school chemistry, which were full of experiments (I had filled 5 loose leaf pages with observations of a candle burning) there would be no experiments. My close-to-retirement chemistry educator could put me to sleep inside 15 minutes and after one week of 90 minute classes, I quit attending and spend the rest of the semester in the lunch room working my way through the exams. I scored 97%. Sadly, when I attended my first Chemistry 200 class at the University of Alberta in a lecture theatre with 250 other students, I discovered I had arrived in Greece – at least it sounded like the lecturers were speaking Greek. One experience in the lab made it clear we would be marked on the achievement of the “right results” and convinced me I had not learned enough or maybe any chemistry to this point and I dropped Chemistry 200.

Some might say I learned nothing.

I felt I had learned a lot from my chemistry experience. It allowed me to approach the rest of my teacher training with a new concept of what learning was all about.

So unlike Edna’s daughter, my ability to recall any of the periodic tables (which I must have been able to recall at one time) is limited to the phrase “Little Betty Boron” and yet, like Edna’s daughter, I owe one of my greatest educator insights to the teacher who tried to get that darn table into my brain. Go figure.  

Who Will Put the Culture in Agriculture?

One of the balls I have in the air is developing a primary research experience for urban kids at the very rural connected event called Farmfair held every fall in Edmonton in conjunction with Canadian Finals Rodeo. It is my firm belief that the majority of people living in cities are far removed from any understanding of who/what/where/how and when food arrives on their tables.

This blog will not be a finger pointing exercise. It is just an observation about how it is that in a place where a 40 minute drive in any direction can still put you on the spot where pieces of the human being food chain grow, there are many who have not seen a real, live cow or smelled for themselves the clean, fresh fragrance of flowering canola. This is a rich mystery and fertile ground for all kinds of inquiry – even by me.

I grew up in Alberta in a time when almost everyone had a farm somewhere in their family, even if they themselves lived in the city. But I am, by my own admission, old, and those times and demographic trends long gone. And here I am learning all about the power of technology to teach and reach in many ways I never imagined.

I know in my heart, though, and based on many years of teaching experience, that you just cannot make many connections to some ideas if a human being does not have a real-life sensory experience to build on.

This past Thursday evening, one made memorable by another spring dump of snow that turned the Edmonton streets into a driving obstacle course (cue Ian Tyson’s Spring Time in Alberta) I attended Who Put the Culture in Agriculture? an enthusiastic production of the U of A class of Animal Science 200. I smiled, laughed, tapped my toe and even sang a few lines of choruses along with the family and friends of the students as they explored some of the people who have had an impact on our food and lives. It was clear from the video presentations they had gone out and done some hands-on learning (if only to catch some memorable video footage) and interviewed experts to get the low down on the person or concept their group was exploring.

To be honest their audience was a group of insiders who got most of the jokes. A trio of senior class presenters were wrestling with the question of how to make consumers more knowledgeable about their food.

I am confident I have one answer – it is to start with kids and we need to make all the ways that food gets from the farm to the fork real, through concrete experience and the opportunity to ask questions from experts of all kinds.

So that is one of the balls I am working to move high into the air. There will be more about it here as the fall draws near.

If you want a see-it-with-your-own-eyes experience you might consider checking out the Farm and Ranch Show at Northlands, March 29-31. It is a consumer show here in the city for the rancher and farmer where you could learn about the pieces of business they need to invest in to bring food to your fork. Go do some primary research of your own.