Thinking About Learning

Yesterday I went to Lynch’s Woods to hike. There’s a trail there that is a small section of the Palmetto Trail. I had never been there before, and I ended up on a trail that wasn’t the one I had intended to hike. Even though I had a trail map, there were times when I was pretty clueless about where I was. In many places the trail was covered with a crunchy blanket of fall leaves and was only discernible because the trail was slightly more indented into the earth than the leaf-carpeted forest floor. The trail I was on intersected with several other trails, and there were times when I was unsure of which direction to take. I had the awareness that since I’d never been here before, even if I always took the correct path, I still wouldn’t really know where I was going. It was a lovely experience of silence and solitude, but I had many concerns. According to the map, my trail was 7 1/2 miles long. Was I going the right way? Would I get lost in these acres of woods? Would I get out before it got dark? Would my husband have to alert a search team to find me?

While I was hiking, I also thought of how my uncertainties mirrored some of the current uncertainties in education. There are so many unanswered questions about the future! Will the next president really understand the needs of public education? Will No Child Left Behind be revised to provide a fairer, more balanced system of accountability? Will lawmakers ever “get” that the current framework of the education establishment is decades behind the educational needs of our students and that we need to be preparing them for the 2020’s, not the 1980’s? There’s no way to know for sure if we’re on the right path; no way to know where we’re really headed, and if we’ll find our way. All that I know to do is the same thing I did on the trail…keep moving forward, make the best decisions we can along the way, and head in the direction that our hearts and minds lead us. Hopefully we’ll eventually find our way in the midst of this changing world, and we’ll make a difference in the lives of our students.

Curriculum Connections:
ELA (Word Study): SpellingCity.com is the best online word study tool I’ve seen. I found it on Rambling Reflections. Teachers can create spelling lists, and the 3 components are Teach Me, Play a Game, or Test Me. The voice used is very pleasant and natural sounding. In Teach Me each word is read aloud and a sample sentence is given orally. This website could also be used for sight word recognition. This could be a great intervention for RTI!

Math: Teach using money with Learning to Use Money. This interactive site teaches about the history of money, using coins and bills, and has practice activities.

Technorati: hiking , NCLB, education