AUSSIE

Blog entry posted February 16th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Yes, I’m still hung up on the Zeigarnik effect. I feel its weight on my shoulders every day in the schools. What is our work coming to? A flash of light that fades almost before it’s lit in the short term memory of the students, or the building of a pattern that will serve the students for a lifetime?

Walt Whitman has a line in his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth” (also cited in my third blog post) that reads

The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whether and how,

Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?

Thus go my doubts, that our lessons amount to no more than flashes and specks.

This is why we need Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The Knight of the Sorrowful Face, having decided to banish himself to the wilderness and behave like a lunatic to prove his love for Dulcinea, has sent his squire Sancho Panza to deliver a love letter to her. Sancho accidentally leaves the letter behind, but claims to have converted it to memory. He explains that, “I memorized when your grace read it to me, and so I told it to a sacristan, and he transcribed it point for point from my memory, and he said that though he’d read many letters of excommunication, in all his days he’d never seen or read a letter as nice as that one.”

“And do you still have it in your memory?” asks Don Quixote.

“No, Señor,” responds Sancho, “because after I told it to him, and had no more use for it, I set about forgetting it….”

As perfect an example of the Zeigarnik effect as you’ll ever find! But cast in a light humorous enough to lift the weight for a moment or two. A teacher told me a couple of weeks ago about a struggling student who, when asked what unit contained 365 days, said, “a meter.” Yes, a bit of laughter before we try the next approach.

My theory on why Sancho forgot? Because the letter didn’t mean enough to him. It wasn’t his own letter to his own lover. There weren’t enough connections to make it meaningful. Best “set about forgetting it” so it doesn’t take up the synaptic space needed for what’s really important: your dreams of ruling an island kingdom…or savoring a slice of pizza when school lets out.

Here’s what Leonardo DaVinci has to say on this theme of connections. It was passed along to me by Teachers College’s estimable Ruth Vinz in a workshop on inquiry:

Principles for the development of a Complete Mind:
Study the science of art,
Study the art of science,
Develop your senses –
especially to learn how to see.
Realize that everything connects to everything else.

Indeed, realize that everything connects. Understand it as teachers, cultivate the understanding in our students, and we’re on our way. We’ve found the golden thread that, as William Blake says, will, in pedagogical terms, “…lead you in at Heaven’s gate / Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

More on this idea of the golden thread next week, how the poet William Stafford pursues it, and how it led a class of second graders to Descartes through a can of spam.

In the meantime, I promised a book recommendation. My friend Laurie Marshall, a voice in that same wilderness (the word has positive connotations for me) roamed by Don Quixote, myself, and so many other educators, self-published a volume called Beating the Odds Now! Ten Steps for Teachers to Meet the Standards and Still Love What They Do! It can be found at www.beatingtheoddsnow.com.  It’s a shaggy book, with a chapter titled “Consult Nature.” When’s the last time we consulted nature in our lesson designs?

There is pleasure in realizing that everything connects to everything else, especially when those connections bring us closer to each other. Enjoy making them.