The Rookery

Recently, I took my sons and a friend up to the Science Museum for an afternoon.  We began outside in the "Big Back Yard" area, hanging out at the stream table.  And hang out we did.  

We spent more than an hour diverting the water here, making giant lakes there, setting up civilizations along a riverway, destroying the civilizations with massive floods, creating geo-political havoc by controlling water sources.  We tried to make canals, fantasized about how we would design the streambed differently, talked to the maintenance person who was in charge of making sure that the filters didn't get clogged with sand (no small feat.)  I spent a fair amount of time trying to make a lake stretch across the whole table — you aren't aloud to step into it, much to our dismay.

Four or five families came and went in the time we spent there and we only left because we didn't have sunscreen on.

As I sat there playing in the muck I resolved to remember how crucial time is to learning.  So often we rush from one thing to the next in life and the classroom.  Indeed, had I paid full price for a museum admission I know I would have felt an urge to "see more" during our visit.

But really, by spending all of that time at the stream table, we were seeing more.  It was only through playing and failing and building again that we could really understand how the water was working.  Our first rudimentary dams were followed by more complex designs.  We began to anticipate potential problems in our plans.  We even began to explore the geographical forces behind political decisions.  Our sandcastles and fortresses that were on fast flowing rivers soon collapsed or were flooded (heh, heh) while those on more protected banks prospered.

Had we not spent the time, this learning would have been impossible.  No sign could have captured it.
 No droning docent could have communicated it.  The "learning outcomes" weren't determined before we created them.  We needed time to learn about the materials, find out what they could do, hypothesize, fail and try again.  We had to explore it for ourselves and that takes time.

So this year, I will remember to make time for the messiness of learning.  We will take the time to explore and wonder and fail.  And when I feel the urge to cover it all, I'll take a deep breath and remember the value of learning things well and deeply.  And I will take the time we need.