The Irony

I had long conversations with the teacher during this visit. One of the issues we discussed was the difficulty designing activities. He told me "I am trying to design activities, but it is very hard to integrate concepts from different areas".

The curriculum for rural school is organized in thematic units (i.e. human body, energy, environment, etc.), which include the concepts of the different domains. The teacher has to design and facilitate activities for each grade (first to six) in math, science, social sciences, Spanish and agriculture, keeping in minds the guiding topic.

Given the material he has to propose activities that integrate concepts from several areas, I can see the difficulty he faces. I encourage him to think beyond what it is propose in one week and look at the material as guide to propose activities that may be of interests to the students. I also tell him that it is ok (and good) to revisit a concept more than one time because students will be able to make even deeper connections.

As we work on this issue I can’t stop thinking about the irony: we don’t experience life as a series of disconnected facts, we artificially created the division, but somehow we lost the ability to go back. I don’t know if it is because we have a hard time making explicit the concepts on a given activity, or because we still think that “real” learning happens in a vacuum.