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which_chickSo I'm re-reading the PNHP entry for Fulton County because of reasons and I'm like... why did we waste time in high school reading shit about biology that DID NOT MATTER TO US? Why didn't we look at the ecosystems around us, the things we could touch and see and explore? Instead we had dumb-ass textbooks talking about broadly-generalized shit. Ugh.
It is, perhaps, harder to go from "This is part of the Appalachian Ridge-n-Valley Province, here are the species you find in a typical chestnut-oak forest, these are our common invasives, this is the stuff you find in creeks, etc..." to "All ecosystems" but it is also more real to the learners.
It is more real for people in my area to learn about invasive species like gypsy moth caterpillars when you can see their frass all over your car every morning and see them clustered on the tree trunks. You can see the dying oaks. You have sort of a vested interest in them.
It is more real to learn about the loss of the American Chestnut to blight when you can find root sprouts trying again on every mountain ridge. Go out in the early fall and look for ones that got big enough to set fruit. Roast them, eat them, see what has been lost.
It is more real to learn things that pertain, basically. And biology is one of the things that it is super-easy for schools in Greater Rednecklandia to make pertain. And yet they did not.
I get that rain forests are important and so are polar bears and shit but emphasizing that shit leads to a "what we have here and now is not so important as those other things" and that's a false perception. Our stuff is important, too. And it's real. Personal. Immediate.
We did not go outside to see the natural world. We sat inside, at desks. There were microscopes we did not use (but could have used -- they are not that difficult to use) and there was ditchwater we did not look at. We did not do an insect project or a leaf project. We did not have any outdoor homework to encourage us to look at the world.
SO FUCKING MUCH THAT WE DID NOT DO.
Good grief, were they even trying?
You know what we did in the spring in my tenth-grade biology class? We talked about baseball. Or rather, our teacher and the boys in the class who were on the baseball team... they talked about baseball. It was not super-inspiring. Or educationally useful. Or really, anything other than a colossal waste of my time.
It is, perhaps, harder to go from "This is part of the Appalachian Ridge-n-Valley Province, here are the species you find in a typical chestnut-oak forest, these are our common invasives, this is the stuff you find in creeks, etc..." to "All ecosystems" but it is also more real to the learners.
It is more real for people in my area to learn about invasive species like gypsy moth caterpillars when you can see their frass all over your car every morning and see them clustered on the tree trunks. You can see the dying oaks. You have sort of a vested interest in them.
It is more real to learn about the loss of the American Chestnut to blight when you can find root sprouts trying again on every mountain ridge. Go out in the early fall and look for ones that got big enough to set fruit. Roast them, eat them, see what has been lost.
It is more real to learn things that pertain, basically. And biology is one of the things that it is super-easy for schools in Greater Rednecklandia to make pertain. And yet they did not.
I get that rain forests are important and so are polar bears and shit but emphasizing that shit leads to a "what we have here and now is not so important as those other things" and that's a false perception. Our stuff is important, too. And it's real. Personal. Immediate.
We did not go outside to see the natural world. We sat inside, at desks. There were microscopes we did not use (but could have used -- they are not that difficult to use) and there was ditchwater we did not look at. We did not do an insect project or a leaf project. We did not have any outdoor homework to encourage us to look at the world.
SO FUCKING MUCH THAT WE DID NOT DO.
Good grief, were they even trying?
You know what we did in the spring in my tenth-grade biology class? We talked about baseball. Or rather, our teacher and the boys in the class who were on the baseball team... they talked about baseball. It was not super-inspiring. Or educationally useful. Or really, anything other than a colossal waste of my time.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 01:50 am (UTC)