"Interesting. You're afraid of insects and women. Ladybugs must render you catatonic." - Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory

Yesterday was the one lab that I simultaneously love and hate. It involves modeling of river processes using a stream table. It is, in my opinion, by far the most educational lab in the whole series because one gets to observe the processes in action, make predictions, and then take measurements to see if their intuition is right (or, if you are one of those rare students who actually does read the lab ahead of time, that you understood the explanations).

My feelings about the lab are entirely dependent on the excitement level of the students. My second lab yesterday had a group that really enjoyed themselves. They got into it, built things like little sandcastles, got their hands all dirty, cheered when their structures worked they way they wanted, and mourned the loss of plastic cows that were too close to the banks that were highly susceptible to erosional processes. They also mocked the monopoly hotels that were stupid enough to build on riverfront property.

Contrast that with one of the earlier groups. I had two large spoons and I told them they needed to use them to dig a river channel in the sand. Everyone looked at me blankly. Finally, one student took one of the spoons. Everyone else just stood there and watched. After a little bit, I told them that if someone didn't take the other spoon and start digging, they were all going to fail that lab. (Yeah, I prefer to use a carrot...but there are occasions where a blunt object needs to be employed.) The rest of the group still was extremely uninvolved. Instead, they complained to me about how they hated sand and didn't want to get dirty. There were no sandcastles, cows, or hotels.

I've noticed this a lot lately, and I think it comes down to this: city-dwelling kids hardly get to play outside unsupervised. They also develop huge aversions to dirt and other...stuff. (The exceptions are those whose parents made an effort to get them outdoors or participated in various rituals such as the deer opener.)

My rural area friends have commented on this same trend. Most kids don't do anything unsupervised in cities and spend all of their time indoors. School is making this worse. Kids are being given ever more homework at younger grades, seat work is now taking place in kindergarten, etc. Contrast this with my rural area friends and relative whose kids play outside a lot, understand how things work, aren't afraid of dirt, and, forgive me for saying this, are a fairly skinny lot. They're also fairly independent (i.e. not like my son, who, left to his own devices would eat nothing but cereal). The city-dweller parents think the rural parents are neglectful, but I tend to think of them as "free-range".

The way my mother talks about me as a child, you'd think I never went outside. I admit that I spent a lot of time reading. However, not all my time. I played in the mud, I watched tadpoles change into frogs, I studied ladybugs and boxelder bugs, made a sundial, observed the stars (one thing that big cities REALLY wreck), played in the snow, collected rocks, etc. Girl scout summer camp was the one thing that made girls scouts worthwhile. Instead of sitting inside doing crafts, we actually got to go camping and hiking.

I've come to the conclusion, probably as a result of both my upbringing and my experience as a homeschooling parent, that experiential learning is more powerful than book learning. Now, I'm certainly an advocate of books and learning from them, but you aren't going to get the whole picture from that. I'm also seeing younger kids get less and less of this learning or even actively resisting it. When it comes to basic concepts, they are often stymied.

In the first lab, we discuss ice on a river. When I ask the question about how water freezes, the only kids who answer are those who have been ice-fishing. The rest don't know. I'm sure they were told somewhere in their long, arduous public and private school careers, but they never SAW it. I am finding more and more things like this that I learned about in school, but that I only REALLY learned it when I saw or experienced it. It makes me sad to realize that fewer kids are having the real opportunities to learn. Rather than giving them more homework or summer school, kids really need to get outside and have the opportunity to experience things, to make mistakes, and do some REAL learning.