Borderland

People say that experience is the best teacher, and I tend to agree. However, despite numerous examples I have in support of this maxim, I also have plenty that refute it. Many are the times that experience has indicated a course of action other than what I chose.

Light rain last Sunday morning, for instance, should have suggested something else for me to do, but summer’s end in Alaska is near, and gathering firewood has priority on my list. The woodcutting road is little more than a graded trail. It has never been graveled, and it’s built on loess, silt that changes from powdery dust to greasy slime when wet. The rain was intermittent throughout the morning, but I didn’t think it had done any damage to the road.

The truck slid momentarily in one spot on the way in, and I gave a thought to turning back, but that would have been overly cautious by any standard. The road wasn’t that bad. I drove about 7 miles before I parked to have a look around. My scouting mission didn’t turn up any easy-to-get log piles, and though there was some dead standing birch that I could have fallen and bucked into stove wood, I decided that by the time I got the truck loaded, I might not get out. It was raining steadily by then, and I didn’t know if driving home would be dicey. I decided to head back, and return another day for the wood.

It took less than 3 minutes to realize that driving out empty was a mistake. My oversized Goodriches glided back and forth across the slimy road like hockey skates. I careened alternately between the bank-side ditch and the ravine-side abyss at an angle far from my preferred direction of travel. This nonsense came to an end when the truck refused to align itself with the right-of-way and instead began to slide rear first toward the road’s bad side. I stopped with barely a wheel’s width between the ravine and my right rear tire. The tires all looked like racing slicks, caked with wet brown plastic.

I was desperate, and as necessity breeds invention, an inquiry project was born. According to Maxine Greene in “What the Known Demands:”

Since all genuine education comes through experience, the teacher’s obligation is to arrange for the kinds of experience that exact and promote thinking….According to Dewey, learning takes place when students are given something to do rather than something to learn. What they do should be significant and worthwhile; it should relate to real life undertakings.

Whereas my initial inquiry was simply to see if there was wood to be found, I’d revised my question to account for new and compelling data. The truck was stuck in the middle of a muddy trail 3 miles from gravel. My options were to continue driving and send the truck into a ravine, abandon the truck and walk, leaving it in the middle of the road, or quickly gather some wood for weight.

At this point the inquiry begins. First, the individual feels he is in a situation that is either indeterminate or confused….They begin to put their minds to work, to think about what is happening….

To avoid compounding my error, I chose a tree that would NOT fall on the truck. An uphill tree was my obvious first choice. I cut down a medium sized spruce that fell away from the road. I bucked it up and tossed the pieces down. The second tree fell onto the road. I climbed down the bank and began to trim the branches when I had the inspiration to use them for traction under the wheels.

They may develop a hypothesis..

This turned out to be the crux move. I slogged back and forth through the mud with my logs and branches until I had the whole arrangement complete. I had green spruce boughs packed around all 4 wheels and the back of the truck was piled with logs that had uncut branches waving at crazy angles. Was it heavy enough now?

Vague uneasiness has given way…to cognition. They have resolved their perplexity; they wait to see if they are right. If they are correct…then these students have learned something as a result of their questioning.

I drove right out. The branches around the wheels got me through the critical first two feet, and the weight of the wood helped keep me pointed in the direction I wanted to go after that. I crawled back to gravel in second gear, and I learned that when the road is muddy, weight in the back is essential for traction. But I already knew that.

At my age I can usually claim to be “old enough to know better” where regular foolishness is at issue. I expected occasions for regret to diminish as time passed and experience mounted. But they have not. Errors of judgment are common even for prominent people, as volumes of history attest. Tempting fate is a tendency in people that is logic-defiant, a willful entertainment of the irrational. I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes an experience educational, a meaningful moment that can inform future decisions. I’ve concluded that the Known demands regular exercise.

[source: Maxine Greene, Teacher as Stranger]