It’s a phenomenon in my
neighborhood. Children are guided at school. Children are guided at play. So many children are engaged in guided
after school activities that there are no children out playing on the
block. In the summer most of the
children spend time at one or more camps.
This got me thinking.
I always hate when people
say, “when I was a kid…,” but when I was a kid I remember spending a few weeks
at day camp, sailing lessons and playing softball. The rest was pretty much filled with endless days of
searching for blue claw crabs off the docks by my house. Early in the morning I’d hop on the
banana seat of my bike with a bucket hanging off the handlebars, a ball of
string and a crab net. Then I’d
ride down to the local fish store and get a fish head to bait the crabs. My summers were spent this way,
exploring the shore, talking to fishermen, learning to ride the waves, becoming
familiar with the local ecosystem.
I remember the thrill and the terror of catching my first eel, which I
threw, wriggling, back into the sea along with my pole and all the bait.
The point of this isn’t to
walk you down my memory lane, but to jog the memories you hold of childhood
summers. Sure I have bad memories
too. The lack of a/c, mosquitos that buzzed my ear all night, the boredom that
came along with three months of freedom and culminated in hours of watching the
clouds roll by while making grass whistles.
Think back, would you trade
those days for ones filled with guided activities?
My guess it that maybe
half of you would. But I think we
are missing a huge opportunity with our children when we don’t give them the chance
to explore on their own. This year my daughters,
who are 8 and 11, have been given a lot of freedom. It took a huge amount of trust for them to overcome the fear
that they lacked the abilities to navigate the world and even more trust for me
to overcome the fear that freedom would result in disaster.
Exactly the opposite has
happened. My children are more interested and engaged in their world that ever
before.
An old microscope sits in
the living room, this year it has been used to examine flowers, spit bug spit
and tiny creatures swimming in harbor water. My daughters discovered an
ecosystem of thousands of fiddler crabs walking the shore at daybreak. They
built forts out of driftwood and walked to town, purchasing ice cream with
money they earned dog sitting.
They got an internship at the library using Photoshop to design
bookmarks for the adult summer reading program. They helped me craft and perform book talks for our new
story, The Boy Who Cried Sea Monster. 
If I relate this to school
terms my daughters have spent the summer combining math, science, engineering
and english language arts to create PBL projects using discovery and inquiry to
formulate conclusions that led to results. They have been self guided and have gotten feedback from
people in different areas of the world on their projects. They could not have accomplished this
had I guided them.
As we move forward with
new teaching methodologies, common core and technology, which some students will master before their teachers, I think it’s important to remember that
many of these ideas have been here all along.
The greatest thing we can
give to our children, our students, is the opportunity to use what they
know. Trust and believe in your
students this year and who knows the results may surprise you, they may even
change the world.
