Day 16: Curiosity

We did three ATMs today. I slept through two of them. My brain has apparently decided it's overloaded and needed a break. It's a good thing, really. It means I learned a lot last week, and maybe the weekend wasn't quite enough recovery time. We spent last week learning how to do a Judo roll, although none of us really figured out where the series of ATMs was going until the last day or two. I never actually did a full Judo roll, only the very beginnings of it, but even that was enough to give me a solid idea of how it works and a lot of new information for my brain to process. This week's series is very obviously going to result in a headstand. I happen to be more interested in how to get into a headstand than in actually getting completely upside-down, so that will make the week much easier.

I listened to an interesting interview today, a recent edition of The Diane Rehm Show featuring Diane Ravitch. Diane Ravitch was an employee of the first W. Bush administration, and at the time was a full supporter of No Child Left Behind. Since then, in seeing the generally useless and negative results of the program, she's changed her mind completely and wants to get rid of it entirely. She's worried about schools turning into businesses based on competition instead of providing equal-opportunity public education, kids not getting complete educations because teachers are told to teach to the test and are forced to leave out some subjects, and teachers losing their jobs because their classes can't always meet the very high expectations of the tests. I think those are all extremely important points, but she's missing one, in my opinion.

The idea of having fun at school is mentioned very briefly in the interview, and I think deserves more time. Some discussion topics in class today were "What is learning?", "How do you know when you've learned something?", and "How can we learn how to learn?" We spent a long time talking about the last question, and the clearest answer we came up with was this...

It only becomes possible to learn when there is curiosity.

That's what Ravitch missed. We know now that teaching to the test doesn't work, because it leaves students and teachers stressed and leaves out major pieces of any curriculum, but it also doesn't leave any space for curiosity. Think back to your favorite teachers, at any point in your life, the ones who taught you the most. You probably didn't like them because they were funny, or strict, or whatever you liked in a teacher, but because they made you curious and made you think. That is impossible to do when you're teaching to a test, no matter what the test is. Whether it's a 3rd grader who has to take a standardized test or a 90-year-old who is told to do strengthening exercises, no one can learn anything unless they're curious about what they're learning. If that 3rd grader has decided they don't care about the test or about school, they might learn how to pass the test, but they won't learn anything about the information they're being tested on, no matter how much time they spend in class. If that 90-year-old has turned into a cynic from seeing too many pessimistic doctors and isn't interested in learning to walk again without a cane, they will have the cane forever, no matter how hard the physical therapists try.

If our class can remember this week to not worry about actually doing a headstand and keep our curiosity present in the process of learning how to do one, we will learn more than would ever be possible by forcing ourselves upside-down.