I’ve mentioned before that my oldest daughter, who is in kindergarten, was working with her class on a project concerning ancient Egypt. We saw the finished product of their work. It was incredible, what these 5- and 6-year olds did.
The teacher does not plan something in advance. She says she looks for a spark from the kids to see what they are interested in, and then starts to work on it with them. The students came up with a set of questions they wanted to know. They went on a trip to the museum. They “read” books and learned all they could about the Ancient Egyptians. They even learned how to classify different facts into research categories they came up with, and designed large note cards for display within their classification system. This was a new approach the teacher was trying, with the idea that by the time they are in second grade they will be able to research anything. They learned tons of stuff — about the organs being stored in canoptic jars, and even how the brain is removed from the body (through the nose, in case you were wondering)!
The class also took a “trip” to Egypt. They turned their room into a plane, decided on pilots and flight attendants (the A.P., a teacher’s aide, and the teacher, respectively). They made a sarcophagus of a king they named, with a “mummy inside. They made canoptic jars and made their own hieroglyphics and other drawings. There was also a museum of their own artifacts and a library of Egypt books. It was stunning. Their presentation for the parents was terrific. They made special garb so they looked like ancient Egyptians and then each student gave out a fact about the Egyptians and about their own “pharaoh” lying in the tomb! The principal said the sixth grade classes would have to come and see this, since they are learning this topic as part of the standard curriculum.
I was truly stunned at what they did, and I bemoaned how my college-level students could not do this. I’m serious. They have a hard time classifying materials. They don’t want to write note cards, opting to cut and paste material and call it research. Few could really conceptualize like this. And finally, the spark is not there. They don’t have a lot of interest in doing the research.
How does our education system work to kill that spark? I believe it does contribute to the dousing of it. Is it the natural inclination of idle bored teens with hormonal changes? I saw clips of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the other day, and there’s that shot with the teens in the classroom completely bored and devoid of any interest as a dull teacher droned on. What happens between 6 and 16?
It’s not just interest, either. It’s competence. My daughter’s class is learning the basic rules of punctuation, and they are getting the idea of sentence boundaries. Many of my students still use a comma like it’s a period. The K class can tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction; my students use the terms “essay” and “story” completely interchangeably, and they seem not to make any distinction, believing fiction to be fact.
Lastly, I fondly remember reading Shakespeare in high school. I am teaching Hamlet now, and remembering the great fun we had reading and discussing the play – and really, playing, as it were, with it, its language, its theater. It’s a great play. And most of my students just could not possibly care less. It’s just a lot of fancy words to them.
How do we make our children continue to love learning as they do in those early years? How can we not kill their sparks? We need to find a way of making them stay curious.