1)A desire to learn. So here's the thing about learning--you have to choose it. It cannot be forced on you--it will just roll off your brain like water. You can be forced into believing that you HAVE to learn something, and then it becomes something you desire, but you cannot be forced to learn. Period.
2)A teacher. This can be literally anyone. I had this professor in college--a coach who taught health. I was a senior, getting ready to leave my institution of higher learning and forced to take health as a requirement for getting my teaching certificate. I cannot tell you the level of disdain with which I looked at this class and this teacher. In my mind, I called him "Droopy Dog," because, well, he looked like Droopy Dog. One day--and I don't know exactly what I did, but it probably involved eye-rolling--he called me out into the hall. He told me that I was missing out. That every person, every class had something to teach me. He told me that my disdain was obvious and contagious. He said, "Open your eyes. There is something you can learn every single place you are." In that way, he might have been the most important teacher I had.
And those two things, my friends, are all you need to be able to learn. Side note: it is NOT all you need to be able to teach--I do NOT, in any way, mean to denigrate the gifts, talents and back-breaking work of professional teachers. Teachers are asked to solve for this problem, every day:
You have 30 human beings in a small space every day. Each of them learns differently.
In 180 days, move all of those humans forward on the path of their learning in
every possible category based on criteria set by people who don't understand learning.
Go.
When I was a teacher, I did not care about messages that lauded my hard work or that made me out to be a hero. What I wanted was better pay, smaller class sizes, and the respect to do the job the way I knew best. What we are walking into right now is a completely different set of problems and we would do well to examine the question above and ask ourselves, "Is this what we want to keep asking our teachers to do? Remotely? Is that even possible?" I think teachers, with very, very few exceptions, are brilliant and compassionate and wonderful--I am not writing an essay about them.
With that caveat, I want to remind us that this essay is about learning and what we will need to understand about learning as this virus progresses and we find our new normal. Our children will learn what they desire to learn. What helps children desire to learn? They are, mostly, literal human beings. So they will learn about what interests them. One child will pour over the statistics for an athlete, another will be interested in small things, a third will understand, intuitively, how things move in the world. You just never know. Would you like the child to understand numbers and equations? Build something. Cook something. Sew something. Plant something. Do you think it is important that the child understand history? Tell stories. About history. Make a set of cards with events and give them to the child and walk away. Write the names of Presidents of the 20th century on Legos or wooden blocks and have the children stack them in order. Hide them in the house and require that, when they find one, they have to tell you a story from that President's administration. Make each child President for a day in 1976 and ask, "What should we do about the oil shortage?" Or in 1929. Or in 2020.
There are really a very few core skills that human beings need to acquire in order to be able to do whatever they want for the rest of their lives:
--Communication (reading, writing, speaking, listening)
--Calculation (all the maths)
--Decision-making (including core values and the ability to set core values)
--Body Awareness (coordination, application of core values, muscle memory)
--Creation (applying imagination to the skills above)
You may have a few others, but really, from these five sets of skills, a human being can learn anything they need to learn for the rest of their lives. It is a matter of submitting themselves to a teacher, of being ready to learn whatever lesson is being offered to them. I learned to learn from everybody--what NOT to do is just as important a lesson as what TO do. And I've never met anyone that I did not admire in some way--not a single person I can think of who did not have some skill I could learn from.
And learning, in its nature, requires failure. Before we learn something, we fail at it again and again and again and again. If we fail one hundred times, it is progressing to attempt 101 that might do the trick. Our educational system disdains failure and makes it aversive--we can take this opportunity to embrace failure, to make it a desirable part of the learning process. When my children were small, and they would fall down and get hurt, my husband would ask them, "Did you get blood? If you got some blood, you must have been having fun." Now, I have to admit, that I didn't go full in on this, especially at first. But what I found was not that my children tried to harm themselves, but that they didn't avoid things just because they might get hurt. They are brave, my children, and I am proud of them for being so brave--their ability to go boldly into the world and make decisions for their own lives is a beautiful thing to watch. The very best thing parents can do for their children is give them space to make their own mistakes, even to get little damaged in the process, so that their brains can acquire the necessary learning to enable them to engage bravely in the world and solve their own problems. Failure creates that desire to learn, especially if one of the things we have been taught is that failure is simply a necessary step toward success.
Being a teacher, mostly, is about meeting one human being exactly where they are, digging into what they want to learn, accepting what they have to teach, and sharing what you know. It is opening doors and shining light, allowing others to make their own discoveries. I think we have a chance, here, to really partner with our teachers. To really enhance our educational system. Rather than trying to replicate a classroom (which is SO not the best format for learning), we have a chance here to set up something new and wonderful--to free our teachers up from the @#*)_#$(**@&%&# testing that has been the bane of their existence (and the children's and the parents') for almost 30 years.
I know we're only a week into this. This is how my mind works, nimble (if erratic) and quick to move into the next new thing--if you read this, I invite you to take it or leave it. I'm offering it because I think we're at a watershed--I've felt it coming for years (and my guess is that you have too). I would invite all the parents who have been tossed unceremoniously in between their children and their children's education to engage. Strap in. Have fun. What do you have to teach your child? How can you partner with your children's teachers? How can you support them and be part of helping those teachers figure out how to do the job they have been asked to do? Invite your community into this education process--who could show you how to do a garden? Build a doll house? Knit a scarf? Make a bow out of PVC pipe, paracord and electrical tape? Make a marshmallow shooter out of PVC pipe and duct tape? What else can you make out of duct tape? Who do you know who can name all the kings of England? Who loves poetry (probably a smaller group of people than those who can name the kings, but no judgment)? How are language and music related? What do we have in our house that we can make into musical instruments? If your child were to write a book, what would her book be about? What movie would he make? This is our chance to explore learning, to teach the necessary skills in ways that fit the needs of our children. To get out from under grades and tests and get into intellectual challenges and the deep learning that sticks.
I'm in, by the way. And I think we'll find that lots of people will be in as well. The education of our children is vital and those children want to learn. The trick will be to understand that what we want them to learn are those five skills--HOW they learn those skills is pretty close to immaterial. I wish you luck in this--learning is one of the best things we get to do as human beings. Time to learn that again.
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