The first "Education Life" magazine of 2010 in The New York Times (January 3, page 10) contained an essay about adult learning. Barbara Strauch wrote it, and it is called "How to Train the Aging Brain." What first looks like a sidebar is actually, as I discovered after combing the essay, the essay's subtitle: "To keep a middle-aged mind sharp, shake up what you already know.
People with middle-aged minds or beyond, listen up. Those of you tempted to move on because you have younger minds, please stay with this.
First of all, I recommend Strauch's article for all educators of any age. In describing how a particular group of people can use their minds richly, the essay helps all of us consider the dynamics of the student experience in school settings.
Secondly, the essay reminded me of a graph I drew for myself once I had been teaching for several years. I wish I could remember what experience or idea sparked my drawing, but I wish many things. In any case, I plotted points and drew lines. The X axis represented the year, say 1980. The Y axis represented the age of a person. I plotted points for the students' average age, and then for my age. As I connected the dots, two lines took shape--one for them and one for me. Theirs looked like the horizon in just west of Oklahoma, while mine resembled the approach to Mount Shasta in northern California. Now that I think back on creating this graph, I suspect that I had felt a distance between me and my students and wanted to visualize this gap as a way of keeping it in mind.
Back to Strauch's essay itself, and its implications. All teachers, and especially the more experienced ones, need to remember what it is like to learn. Strauch claims that an essential part of this remembering comes from shaking up what we know (or believe we know). In an earlier post, I described how joining a Humanities team in a brand new school helped me explain to myself and others the values of imaginative literature. Although at times I have felt confused and tired, I have come out of those times with a more clear and confident sense of purpose.
Finally, in terms of my work with students, shaking up what I know is a responsibility. Periodically reminding myself of the disorienting part of learning earns me trust with the students. I think it is only fair that what I repeatedly ask them to do I do, also. In other words, I need to keep remembering what it feels like from the inside. Then I can be a trusted guide who remembers the details of the trail we are walking together.
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