For several years, I led classes from another public school onto the Redding Arboretum where I would engage them in various ways.
There is a very simple activity I do with younger classes. There is a streetlight pole near the school that casts its shadow over the school’s lawn. We go to the shadow at the beginning of our walk and I stick a pencil into the ground at the top end of the pole’s shadow. When we return to the shadow 40 minutes later, we discover that the top of the pole’s shadow is now 10-20 feet from the pencil. Something has moved. A good discussion ensues. Lots of interest. What I have learned NOT to tell the kids is that the shadow moved because the earth moved. That answer does not make sense to them. I simply say “something has moved”. With 3rd and 4th graders, I might hold my hand open with a pencil rising up between my fingers – a model of the lamp pole and show how by rotating my hand from west to east, I can make the shadow on my hand move the same way the lightpole shadow moved. But I don’t give them the phrase “the shadow moved because the earth moved.” The idea, especially for a child, is bigger than that phrase.
The last time I did this activity, the first grade teacher I was with really wanted me to give an explanation to bring “closure” to the “lesson”. Instead, all I would say is “something is moving and it took people thousands of years to figure out what it is that is moving. It’s a hard question to figure out, but maybe as you grow older, you will be able to figure it out.” For me, such an open-ended experience is what learning should be full of. For the other teacher, however, her training shaped her to be uncomfortable with a lesson that did not end with the statement of a fact that would serve as the answer to a test question.(Why do shadows move? Because the earth is turning.) A teacher-guided experience that ends with an unresolved question is “incomplete”, is not a lesson.
She really wanted either her or me at some point to say, “The shadow is moving because the Earth is turning.” This–even if kids would not understand the phrase, or more likely would misunderstand it in a way that would move them further from learning. Nevertheless saying “the truth” at some point in the lesson becomes sort of like saying “Amen” at the end of a prayer. It’s expected. It signals that the lesson can now be considered complete.
P.S. As the teacher asked the kids to line up and walk back to school, one boy was off by himself holding his hands up, moving them about while gazing at what was happening to his shadow on the ground. Eventually he trailed back to school with a friend. The friend said, “That is a hard question.” And the boy answered, “I want to grow up to be a scientist so I can find out the answer to that question.”
As I reflect on this experience, I realize that our current emphasis on standardized testing will shape classrooms into places where students will rarely commune with the unknown. Any question raised will be either officially answered by the end of the lesson or else seen as a time-consuming detour. Curiosity will not thrive in such a setting.
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