AUSSIE

Blog entry posted May 10th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I ended my last post promising to quote physicist Leo Kadanoff on the theme of close observation. Here he is, from James Gleick’s remarkable book Chaos:

It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature.  It's startling every time it occurs.  One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there.  A great shock, and a great, great joy.

Now that’s seeing, isn’t it – to have the construct of your mind correspond to nature – no delusions, preconceptions or pink unicorns standing in the way. Poet Stephen Mitchell hits the same note when he translates a passage of The Tao de Ching as follows:

A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets her intuition
lead her wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed herself of concepts
and keeps her mind open to what is.

The point here? To see – and thus to understand, your mind must be open.

Are you worried we’re getting a little too ferny here? Straying too far from the standards, from the “best practices” established by research, from what we’re paid to do (i.e., cover the material)? Fear not, dutiful professionals. You need go no farther than the New York State Science Standards, Scientific Inquiry, Key Idea 1: “The central purpose of scientific inquiry is to develop explanations of natural phenomena in a continuing, creative process.” Here are the liberating performance indicators students are supposed to meet:

• S1.1 Ask “why” questions in attempts to seek greater understanding concerning objects and events they have observed and heard about.
• S1.1a Observe and discuss objects and events and record observations.
• S1.1b Articulate appropriate questions based on observations.
• S1.2: Question the explanations they hear from others and read about, seeking clarification and comparing them with their own observations. (As a veteran authority questioner, I really go for this one.)

New York State’s official endorsement of the practice of observation continues along these lines for several more digits and letters. It’s one of the reasons I love the standards. They give us permission to do the right thing! You just have to map them into the curriculum sensibly, so you have time to stop and look at the roses, ask questions about them, compare them to tulips, and come to understand something.

As for best practices, the well-researched “Balanced Literacy” model includes “viewing” as one of its core components. And the modeling aspect of the model is all about observation. What happens in the brain during observation? According to Stephen P. Rushton, et. al. in their  article “Connecting Brian Cambourne’s Conditions of Learning Theory to Brain/Mind Principles: Implications for Early Childhood Educators” (Early Childhood Education Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, Fall 2003), “An enriched learning environment increases cell weight, branching of dendrites, and synaptic responses in the brain.” Sounds like a National Enquirer headline, doesn’t it? CELLS EXPAND, DENDRITES BRANCH IN LONG ISLAND CLASSROOM!

As for “covering” the content, what could be a better approach than to, well, take a close look and discover it. In my experience, things have always gotten more interesting when you take the covers off for a look-see than when you put them on. Think birthday present, and, well…think birthday present.

Here we are, back at an empiricist approach to learning, getting ideas into the intellect through the senses. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, the way to a student’s mind must be through the senses.

What about mathematics? Surely this couldn’t apply to mathematics, could it? Civil rights activist and educator Robert Moses thinks it could. After his voter registration initiatives, he looked around for another focus for his considerable altruistic energies. He saw that black male adolescents were having a tough time with algebra. Knowing that levels of achievement in mathematics in high school correlate with several measures of success in college and beyond, and that algebra is the gateway to higher mathematics, he founded The Algebra Project and wrote his book Radical Equations. Here is his five-step method: (1) physical event, (2) picture or model of this event, (3) intuitive (idiomatic) language description of this event, (4) a description of this event in “regimented English,” and (5) a symbolic representation of the event.

Sense it, name it, represent it. (Or as the anti-terrorist crowd puts it, “If you see something, say something.”) I can tell you, it’s not just black adolescent boys who can benefit from this approach. As a white, middle-aged (okay, upper middle-aged) male who always struggled, and continues to struggle, with math when it is presented purely in abstract language, I can appreciate its wonders when it becomes visible.

For me, as for so many, a trip on the subway (one of the “physical events” Moses has used) is worth a thousand work sheets. One would have to be blind to ignore this. But the blind persist in their worksheet ways in too many schools. As Zen Buddhist alt-country and western  singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore puts in his song “These Blues”: “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”

Me? I once was blind, but through the amazing grace of sensible sensory approaches, I now can see. I enjoy life and learning a lot more with my eyes open than during the dark ages of killing and drilling when I went to school.