Lesson Plans Gone Awry
There are only two projects I kept from my student teaching days. One is the portfolio showcasing how hard I worked. The other item was an assignment I gave to a class of third graders during a unit focusing on outdoor life and habitats.
I get more than a little tired of not ever hearing the other side of the story from the environmental slant that is preached to children from their TV, in song lyrics, and in their classrooms. I decided to spend a little time one day discussing the nearly extinct concept of lack of intervention. I tried to explain to these average third graders that, sometimes, it is best to just let things be. Some situations call for direct action, some do not. It is up to us to decide when to step in and when to step out. Nature has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years-without us AND with us. It is egocentric (I did not use that word in the lesson) of us to think that we always make such a huge and detrimental impact on flora and fauna. Sometimes we do, but mostly, animal and plant life just adapt and go blithely on their way, disregarding the whole human species.
Well, most adults cannot grasp this concept, so I don’t know why I expected youngsters to get it. They didn’t. The end of the lesson had an activity where I gave the class members small scenarios and asked them to solve them. In the game of please-the-teacher-even-if –I-don’t-agree, they answered just how they thought I wanted them to. This was the most memorable response of the group. I thought of the ‘controlled burn’ policy so common in my home state when I read this one:
Question: You see that someone has started a fire in dry grass, what do you do?
Answer: Let it burn!
Out of the mouths of babes, right?
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