thirsty

Okay, I'm doing a second writer's workshop post:  what inspired you this week.

I wrote a post in the past about nonconsanguinity, a subject that I stumbled upon while doing other research.  For those of you who aren't Latin masters or link-clickers, consanguinity basically means an incestual relationship.  Please keep reading; I promise I won't rehash all the details I found so interesting earlier.

But wait -- we need just a quick bit of background on me.  I teach sixth grade writing classes, and I continually get off topic with my kids because I think of all kinds of facts that connect in some way, remotely or directly, to what we're covering.  I do my best to get on track, but the poor little crazies often have to sit and listen to me ramble about obscure history, etymology, sociology, and a jillion other things time after time (imagine that).

Yesterday, I was finishing up warm-ups with my AIG (gifted) group of students, and somehow we got on the subject of consanguinity.  Little hands shot up all across the room with questions about how closely related people have to be to have "deformed" children, why anyone would ever want to marry their brother or sister or cousin (ha, as though the marriage is what causes the children to have abnormalities)...on and on.  I even gave them a bit of a history lesson discussing the presence of inbreeding in royalty in the Roman Empire and the British royal families, and talked about studies done on people living in Israeli kibbutzim.  The kids loved that word, by the way.  Giggles all around.

We were well into the conversation when I realized we only had about ten or fifteen minutes of class to complete our lesson, so I gave them a choice -- finish the conversation and do the day's work on your own, or we can speed through the lesson in our remaining time.  We put it to a vote.

Out of twenty-two kids, seventeen wanted to keep talking.

Now, I haven't been out of school all that long, and I remember that we used to choose talking over working just about every time.  The difference, though, was that they weren't asking dumb questions to keep me talking.  They genuinely seemed intrigued.  One kid even said, "This is the best class we've had so far!  This is so interesting!"  And even though we weren't following my plans for the day -- at all -- they were learning, and they were enjoying it.  That's what was inspiring.

Kids are thirsty for knowledge.  They may not want to learn grammar rules or governmental structures, they may not do their work, and they may tell you that they don't care about learning at all.  They are deceiving themselves.  Every day, kids learn about their friends, families, hobbies, routines, and pets.  They like hearing about the strange things people of other cultures do, and hearing what they share with people who are so different.  Kids need to relate, to make connections, to discover similarities and differences between themselves and others.  They don't realize when it happens, but I have the repeated pleasure of seeing those wheels turn every day.

We will fail our kids if we teach to the test.  We will help them if we connect what they need to know with what they already know, with what they care about.  We need to teach our kids to question, to discover, to think.  We need to teach them that learning about anything is valuable, and the specific skills covered in school are simply the building blocks of our ultimate goal -- free thought.

School shouldn't communicate the idea that learning is about gaining a skill set that you will never use.  It's about teaching you how to form your own ideas, preparing you to do something you love and something which you excel at doing your whole entire life.

I will do my best to encourage the voracious pursuit of knowledge and wildly liberated thought in each of my students from here on out.  Thanks for inspiring me, crazies.  :)