A New Adventure Begins

A new adventure has begun.  Having spent seven years free from school and nine months free from work, I have returned to pursue a graduate program in secondary education at the University of Michigan.  This blog will be about all things SCIENCE and all things EDUCATION.

As a first entry, two and half weeks into the program, fellow teaching interns and I were asked to reflect on our technology-in-the-classroom course.  We were tasked with imagining our "ideal classroom" and drawing a simple picture.  Initially, I wanted to do away with all walls and focus strictly on an outdoor setting.  Next, I got an image of those three sided cabins I'd visited when I was a kid.  I struck me that this would be a fascinating idea for a classroom (considering that having an indoor place for storage and escape from bad weather might be desirable).  My design:

For those who can't quite appreciate the beauty of this representation, I sympathize.  Drawing hasn't always been my strongest trait and pen marks bleeding through from the other side don't do much for photo composition...but still...the idea's there.  Essentially, it's a three-walled room, open to forest/prairie/swamp...etc...  There are some desks, some scopes, some storage...but the important part is the outside.  Students should feel that the outside classroom is equally, if not more, important than inside.

The next day, I asked myself WHY these image came into my head as the classroom.  I thought back on all the positive outdoor experiences that have led me to where I am.  When I was young, my family took me hiking. Later, I joined the boy scouts and camped almost every month.  In high school, I took part in several independent study classes which had a heavy field-focus.  In undergrad, I spent two summers at the BioStation.  I have spent countless nights camping outside, and I still don't know even the surface of what there is to even experience.  My senior year, I took a poetry course where we work-shopped with 5th graders from two local schools.  Each week, we spent one day outside, searching for inspiration in nature and jotting down notes and another working together on poetry.

This struck me as a great model for a school.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a school where all the classrooms are open to getting us back in touch with that ethereal thing known as nature?

To ponder the value of connection with the natural world, I end this post with a photo from Lake Superior...mostly because I had it and really like the big lake...