03/25/2022
Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking my students to Clear Brook Farm to visit our friends from years past and spend a day learning outside our schoolhouse.
So often the best learning occurs not just outside of a traditional classroom, but complimentary to an examination of a text. Experience isn't always the best teacher. I think context is the greatest of all teachers. Context gives us the framework by which to evaluate our experiences. Remove our greatest experiences from that context, and we run the risk of fallacies or relativism.
Often we pit learning from a book or resource against learning from an experience. But if we leave out one, it devalues the other. They were meant to enrich each other, not compete against each other.
We try to give our students those experiences as often as possible. So as we study Manifest Destiny, the Trail of Tears, Jacksonian Democracy, and immigrants seeking new hope on the Oregon Trail - we try to create experiences that put our students in touch with simpler ways of living that might bring that context to life.
At Clear Brook Farm we learned of the Osage Indians that once lived and loved that land as we marveled at arrowhead collections from the creek and hiked to scavenge for our own treasures in the bedrock.
We toured the farm: ducks, chickens, sheep, and pigs and learned breeds and characteristics.
We visited the Mennonite butcher (who processed the hog we purchased from Clear Brook this year) who showed us his simple operation, freshly processed hanging beef and taught us about "dry meat" letting us sample some of the best brown sugar dry cured deer bologna I've ever tasted. We even discovered a few souvenir heads outside the kill station, which his cattle dog guarded with his life.
We ate at a local Mennonite owned restaurant where some of the best food I've ever tasted was cooked without any electricity, where the owners treated you like long lost family, with a general store filled with homemade treats - we made sure to pickup some jam while the kids filled their pockets with candies.
We hiked the land and explored a cave the owner had pre-approved for us - crawl space only, leading back to a "room" with sitting room only and a ceiling full of minerals to explore. None of my students hesitated to crawl into that black hole, possessing the same brave spirit of the pioneers they've studied. I crawled about 30 feet in and decided I'll stick to rock climbing - tight spaces were not my thing.
It was a hard goodbye as the students all felt the joy and freedom of a simpler life, full of woods and wild, community and common faith, and an easy place to belong to. Everyone asked to return, before we had ever left.
Experience, context, and community - these are our great teachers.
Special thanks to Clear Brook Farm for being so good to our kiddos and sharing your lives with us!
