May 11, 2008
As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.
I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.
We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.
“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.
“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.
“Why?”
I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.
I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”
She processes this, then nods.
“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”
May 11th, 2008 at 8:33 am
You forget that one person’s “invasive species” is another person’s “evolutionary adaptation”. Now, relate that to humans.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Of course, one person’s “evolutionary adapation” is also another person’s “metacognitive ability to recognize and support local biodiversity.” Now relate THAT to humans.
I understand your overarching point, I think. Industrialized Westerners rarely, if ever, have the proper perspective about our place in the world as human beings. We *ought*, at times, to think of ourselves as no more than an invasive species.
But I also don’t believe that the way to humility is pretending that we are not unique in our role.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Hi Dina
I am curious to know with which grade level you are working in the “pigs” unit? My curiousity is piqued by a quick browse through your comments. Has it been well recieved by your students?
lgw@spcc.nsw.edu.au
http://lgwilliams.edublogs.org
May 11th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Adaptive structures are usually referring to “native” species that are believed to have developed in a particular setting.
Often, what is thought of as an “invasive” species is one that is taken out of it’s native setting, where other forces such as native predators or climate, maintain the species in a balance with those that co-exist with it. The “invasive” species becomes a problem because the species presence disrupts an ecosystem it had not originally occurred in. An examination of Hawaii will give you many good examples.
Now, biologists will argue about how long a species has to be present in an ecosystem before it is considered “native”, don’t get me wrong!
Dina: You would very much like Sarah Stein’s book Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards and while you are at it, look up all the uses of dandelions!;)
May 12th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
@Kim: sounds awesome. Now if you could just find a book I could slip Colin about raising chickens…
@Lisa: 7th. I wouldn’t go any younger. I’ve had my problems with the unit, but none of them have been because the kids didn’t hook in (aside from the deadly boring documentary on Shakers I showed today– NEVER AGAIN.)
They like discussing “forbidden” books, they ask great questions, and the first two chapters of Pigs are gory, funny, and where the bulk of the profanity occurs. I’ve read it out loud to the extreme gratification of sighs, screams, shudders, and students talking back to the characters. I wish they could assess *that* on a state exam.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Dina wrote:
I’ve read it out loud to the extreme gratification of sighs, screams, shudders, and students talking back to the characters. I wish they could assess *that* on a state exam.
Very cool, Dina….
This is certainly my greatest struggle. While my kids regularly engage in this kind of highly motivated dialogue, they’re also the lowest scoring students on the hallway when it comes to end of grade exams.
In the beginning, I kept plugging on, believing that high quality instruction would translate to top scores on EOG exams. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Then, I kept plugging along, figuring that I didn’t care what the tests said. After all, I’m not preparing kids for tests—I’m preparing them for the world.
The problem is, five years later and I’m still getting fussed at for low scores every year! The pressure is building to change my instruction to be more directly connected to the kinds of thinking necessary to properly answer multiple choice reading questions.
That kind of makes me feel dirty!
Does this pressure ever get to you?
Bill
May 14th, 2008 at 8:09 am
[...] The whole point of this quote and my earlier post was that we’re not doing a good enough job of preparing our children to understand the environmental realities of the present and future. Future posts here will be related to what this education might look like in public schools. By no means do I pretend to have any of the answers, but it’s the conversation and the journey that matters. Dina starts some of it here. [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 11:35 am
@Bill: Without a doubt. Read this when you get a minute.
http://theline.edublogs.org/2007/12/04/yep-its-high-stakes/
As it’s my first year in mainstream, and I have not received any scores back for our January exam, I am probably in the eye of the hurricane…but I have no doubt that *something* unpleasant is coming down the pike for me. The trick will be taking balancing out useful and pertinent analysis of the exam with limiting the pervasive idea (both administratively and, for me, emotionally) that the exam is the best, or the only, means of assessing student knowledge.
In fairness to our district I have to say that no one I’ve heard of in ELA has been personally hauled in to discuss raising their test scores; however, the SpEd department is receiving intense and direct pressure to do exactly that.
I’ve worked around the multiple choice issue this year by having students study the concepts of test creation and then writing and revising their own multiple choice quizzes once a month, based on our curriculum. I can only make claims from my own limited set of data, but I can see tremendous growth in their ability to determine what is important to know, what a decent distractor is, and what a question actually is testing. And, most importantly, in owning and kneading the knowledge like this, they review and relearn it– even if they didn’t pick it up when it was first presented.