learning is messy

As I approach the driveway, Joel stands there with a hose, spraying the grass. I expect him to drop everything and run to his daddy. Instead, he waves and smiles, then returns to his duty of running up the water bill and increase the Phoenix drought. Christy and I laugh as we watch him jump in mud puddles. In the midst of this, he asks questions. "What's this?" "What's that?" "Water make mud," he explains in his two year old voice. I am proud of him for making the connection of cause and effect.

Yet, I am also struck by the notion that the vast majority of his learning experiences involve a mess. Whether he is in the backyard playing in the dirt, splashing in his bath tub, shuffling through the bookshelf until he finds his favorite animal book or squishing his hands through Play-Dough, there is a sense that life is a learning experience for him. There is no rigid separation between learning and life.

In my own life, the greatest moments of learning are often messy. It might mean fiddling with a computer until I have made Linux run on an old iMac. Other times, the mess might be the chaotic web-like way that I search the internet. It can be the non-sequential synthesis connected to reading two dissimilar books. Sometimes it's a hard relationship that leads to confusing conversations. Or it might occur in that moment when I witness suffering and I am paralyzed and forced into painful existential questions.

I wonder if the pacing of school can lead to a false notion that learning is safe and easily digestable; that it is tame and can fit within the confines of a spreadsheet on a digitized gradebook or that it belongs in a linear unit, where students take tests that prove if they know the information. I am not arguing against structure. Indeed, I have very structured class. Yet, I wonder if, in structuring school, we have accidentally created a society that believes learning can be easy and clean and orderly.