One of the most enduring questions that junior high and high school students ask teachers is “Why do we have to learn this?” The worst answer is “because it will be on the test.” How many truthful better answers can we come up with? The following story is my coming upon one such answer.
The Chrysalis teachers decided they would like to experiment with finding out what synergy was possible if all the school were studying the same topic at the same time. It so happens that two of the new teachers at Chrysalis, Jeff Burgard and Glen Hoxie, are whitewater river guides. So we decided to have water and rivers be an area of investigation through the year. To start this off, and to create a sense of community and teamwork, Jeff and Glen organized a raft trip for their students (the 5th through 8th graders) down a class 3 section of the Trinity River. I went along with the video camera and filmed the rafts going through several of the rapids which my daughter, Zephyr, then edited into a 10 minute movie.
Jeff saw the movie and wanted to use it for teaching river dynamics. So he took the video camera, went back, and filmed the rapids looking down from the road. He then showed the two films to his class. With his film, he could show a stretch of rapids. As the camera showed a particular stretch, he could use a write on-wipe off pen to sketch on the TV screen the tongues and eddies and other dynamics of a white water rapid. Or he could ask a student to come up and draw circles on the screen on each eddy they could see. After that he would play the raft trip tape and the students could see how they traveled through the same rapid and how the guides had used dynamics that the class had just analyzed to navigate a safer and/or more thrilling ride. The next day, I was to take Jeff”s class out for field studies. We were talking about the river raft lesson and I suddenly realized that it was a perfect metaphor for what we are hoping to teach at Chrysalis. So I gave a talk that went something like this.
You’ve been studying how the rapids in a river work. What once you saw as a lot of swirling, chaotic whitewater now looks different. Now you see patterns such as eddy fences and smiling holes. Now you are learning to use these patterns to move gracefully and exuberantly through what before would have been a turbulent, dangerous rapid. Life is like the rapids. The main thing we are trying to teach here at Chrysalis is seeing and understanding patterns in the world because the more patterns you see in life, the more gracefully and exuberantly you can navigate within life. The less you are at the mercy of forces you don’t understand. The more likely that the forces of the universe will help you rather than flip or hurt you. We want you to have a great ride with life so we are trying to teach you to see and read the patterns within the swirling river of life.
Leave a Reply