Living is Learning: How Cool Is *This*?

"The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, he does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

~John Holt, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Learn

Saturday, May 8, 2010

How Cool Is This?

A few days ago, when it was spring, (because, Dear Reader, it is now winter again), I was mowing the lawn, when suddenly, a little living something wriggled his (her?) way out of the path of the lawn mower.

I turned the mower off and shouted at the top of my lungs: "A snake! A snake!"

No, I wasn't frightened. I wasn't waiting for Mike, my Knight in Shining Armor, to come and save me from the serpent. I was excited. I knew the kids would want to see this!

So, I hollered, and they came running, all except for Yu Yu, who does not like snakes. I ran inside to grab our field guide to reptiles and amphibians, and also a camera, and a net, and a laptop, in case google images might be more useful than the field guide.

The snake looked something like this:

In no time at all, we had the juvenile netted and identified: it was a juvenile Northern Ringneck. Supposedly, their defensive strategies are: 1) freeze, and hope the predator goes away; 2) show the orange underbelly; maybe the bright color will warn off a predator; 3) emit a strong musky odor; 4) bite. Our little Northern Ringneck didn't try any of these strategies, though. He (or she?) just kept trying to wriggle out of the net.

We wanted to hold it, but we didn't know, at the time, that the snake's bite would be unable to penetrate our skin. So we just watched it for awhile, in our net, and then we set it free in the woods behind our house.

Life brings interesting opportunities to encounter something new and unexpected in every moment! The key is to be paying attention.

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"Living is learning and when kids are living fully and energetically and happily they are learning a lot, even if we don't always know what it is. " ~John Holt
"It is good to live and learn." ~Miguel de Cervantes
"We learn more from looking for the answers to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself." ~Lloyd Alexander
"Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons' experiences, and find and make meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value." ~John Holt
"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
Learning is its own exceedingly great reward." ~William Hazlitt
"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory." ~John Taylor Gatto
"This life is a process of learning." ~Lauryn Hill
“It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.” ~John Holt
"I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful." ~Natalie Portman
"What we learn, we learn by doing." ~Aristotle
"I learned the value of hard work by working hard." ~ Margaret Mead
"Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them" ~John Holt
"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think." ~Socrates
"One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more." ~Washington Irving
"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out." ~John Holt
"Self-education, I firmly believe, is the only kind of education there is." ~Isaac Asimov
"All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind." ~Martin H. Fischer
"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement and mystery of the world we live in." ~Rachel Carson
"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them." ~John Holt
"Don't be too timid or squeamish in your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You learn something new every day if you pay attention." ~Ray LeBlond
"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you." ~B.B. King
"Of course, a child may not know what he may need to know in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build on it. If we try to make him learn something else, that we think is more important, the chances are that he won't learn it, or will learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he learned, and what is worst of all, will before long lose most of his appetite for learning anything." ~John Holt
"You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself." ~Galileo Galilei
"The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library." ~Lesley Conger
"I believe that we learn best when we, not others, are deciding what we are going to try to learn, and when, and how, and for what reasons or purposes; when we, not others, are in the end choosing the people, materials and experiences from which and with which we will be learning; when we, not others, are judging how easily or quickly or well we are learning, and when we have learned enough; and above all when we feel the wholeness and openness of the world around us, and our own freedom and power and competence in it." ~John Holt
"Taking charge of your learning is part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person." ~Warren G. Bennis
"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." ~Albert Einstein
"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction." ~Malcolm Gladwell
"Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books." ~Sir John Lubbock
"It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole idea of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." ~Jiddu Krishnamurti
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." T.S. Eliot
"It is important that children bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." ~Jacob Bronowski
"Always walk through life as if you will learn something new and you will." ~Vernon Howard
"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." ~Vilfredo Pareto
"Always question. Always analyze. But in the end, suspend judgment until you've been there. Live it to learn it." ~Mark McClinchie
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood your whole life, but in a new way." ~Doris Lessing
"People learn something new every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong." ~Bill Vaughn
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." ~Alvin Toffler
"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." ~John Dewey
"The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." ~Albert Einstein
"As long as you live, keep learning how to live." ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma." ~Eartha Kitt