I very much enjoy working with my hands. I am the type who thinks in three dimensions, and that could spend an afternoon happily pouring over engineering schematics. I love the smell of wood and soil. I respect a good weld and a clean cut. I love to play with all of the tools and toys. In education, the fruits of our labors may take years to know and understand. When one works with timber, stone and steel, the results have immediacy. They are visceral and concrete (pun intended) and enduring.
I join our maintenance crew in the summer not to make a point or show of it, but because I am so compelled. I have a need to free myself from the confines of my office and to work out problems in real time. I confide in you that construction is therapeutic for me. Working a hammer through a box of nails is cathartic. There is also an art to working with one's hands. To build you must see the unseen, and imagine it into existence, not unlike a child who sees in a pile of pillows and blankets a castle or hideaway, and makes their vision come alive at the foot of your bed.
There are many among us, myself included, who learn best through the use of their hands and bodies. These are the kinesthetic learners. To understand deeply they must put their hands on a problem, walk the distance, put their back into it, wrangle with it, tug and turn it, until they arrive at a solution.
Truth is, we all learn best by doing. Until very recently, say the last hundred years or so, learning by doing was our norm as a species. Our survival depended on our ability to learn by doing, in real time, when the stakes were highest. As civilization developed, and as we became more settled in our existence, we specialized in our labor. This gave rise to a different kind of learning by doing — apprenticeship — which in turn, gave rise to many of our most important and cherished trades, and eventually to schools of engineering and medicine. Of course, if you are or were athletically inclined, sport is only learned by doing.
The real irony of "progressive" education is that we are coming back to a truth that we once abandoned in the classroom. We are actively cultivating collaborative learning, and working to put students back at the center of their own learning. We want children to be doers, not voyeurs, which is why we want more "hands on" activities in the classroom. Kinesthetic learning, augmented by social learning, supports all types of learners: spatial, visual, auditory, naturalist, etc., and learning. Frankly, the more we move away from what is less than affectionately described as "sit and git" in the classroom, and towards dynamic learning opportunities that involve authentic problems, and that activate numerous senses in the process, the more optimally we support learning for all of our students.
And this is our journey towards the International Baccalaureate. We seek to take what we know through research to be critical to effective learning and merge that with tried and true classroom practices — part science, part art, student-centered. We will keep working at our craft because your children deserve it.
See you around campus.