In the midst of a science class, a mildly exasperated eighth grader asked, “But how are we positive that we are right?”

 

“What a great question!” her science teacher responded. He leapt to the smartboard and wrote, “How can you be sure?” 

 

An audible rumble of energy bubbled among the eighth graders assembled in the room. In this physical science class, the impetus for inquiry had transferred from the instructor to the learner. This occurrence was not just by happenstance. 

 

That morning, these thirteen adolescents had woken up and gone to school. Walking through the schoolhouse door, they became students. It was, as it is every day, a fundamentally passive change that provided little guarantee that substantive, lasting learning would occur. 

 

But then, about ten minutes into science class, the students became scientists, a transformation that was triggered by their classmate’s question. The artificial construct of school fell away to be replaced by the quintessential human drive: the active pursuit of a sustainable, irrefutable explanation. 

 

The object of this energetic, self-motivated inquiry?

 

Thirteen individually wrapped Twinkies, each of which had just been carefully described, in writing, on an index card by the eighth graders.

 

The students’ written descriptions were then shuffled and passed around, and the students had found the Twinkie that fit the written description they held. That was where Vanessa, after a few minutes of pursuing the Twinkie described on her card, burst forth with her question.

 

About an hour after I left the classroom, the teacher sent me this spreadsheet. A lesson that had started as a written description of a Twinkie had been transformed into numbers. As the precision increased, differences emerged, until the students could tell each Twinkie apart with certainty.

 

I’d have to ask the students, but I feel certain that she had found the answer to her question. Given her investment in this investigation, I am certain that her focused effort had resulted in a measure of satisfaction. 

 

A little less than a year away from her first ninth grade environmental science, biology or physics class, this young adolescent is well on her way to a lifelong pursuit of demanding scientific inquiry, if she chooses to pursue it.

 

If this is the path she takes, no doubt she will be required to learn and retain copious amounts of information, as has been the case in her Gordon career. 

 

However, of greater necessity will be her motivation to shape and state her own questions, and then to persist in rigorous examination until she owns an answer.

 

I know, from talking with science teachers at several of the local high schools, that Gordon graduates are particularly adept and disciplined at this baseline protocol of authentic learning—observation, description, inquisition, and explanation, so much so that they are often called upon to show their lab partners how they do it.

 

That afternoon, I left the Twinkie chart on my desk and headed off to visit a section of Kindergarten. I brought along my rock collection, an eclectic museum that I have gathered over my seventeen years here. My intent was to show-and-tell my rocks and, in a bit of a stretch, have my students realize that what looked mundane on the surface was, in fact, after close observation, fascinating. 

 

Of course, I loved my visit. When you present to a group of five and six year olds with tangible “I-know-a-lot” energy, an electrical current of “I-can-top-that” impulsive sharing occurs.

 

I was immediately surrounded, literally; the circle of kindergarteners tightened around me as each expert offered his or her knowledge. There was just too much everyone had to say about rocks! 

 

Ultimately, I left my collection on the sharing table, the teacher’s brilliant suggestion that saved me from my somewhat deteriorating lesson. These young learners simply needed more time to look, respond, offer, and notice. 

 

I headed back to my office with my rocks in the watchful care of the students.

 

Forty-five minutes later, this picture was delivered to my door. It is a kindergartener’s accurate rendering of one of my pieces, pictured below: a sliver of a rock, mundane gray on its edges but dramatically colorful on the inside (the “loop” at the top is the string attached to it so that it could be hung).

 

It is a precursor of the precise chart that the eighth grade scientists had created that morning. 

 

And so this had been better than just a day of school. It was a day of true academics—experiences necessary for authentic, sustainable inquiry and discovery. 

 

We all want our children to be academically prepared. Sometimes we worry, and we want evidence that they are getting the “academics” they need to succeed. But when we get caught up in this adult anxiety, we risk looking for the wrong things. 

 

It’s the eighth grader’s ownership of the process of inquiry that makes me certain of her potential to pursue a career in the sciences. And it’s the kindergartener’s capacity for close observation that reveals to me her first critical step toward academic success. 

 

At Gordon, the definition of “academic” will always dig well below the superficial semantics of school to the deep and long-lasting currents of what a child is thinking, questioning, and, through precise observation, coming to know. 

 

These currents must be tapped into early on and, through planned lessons, brought back up to the surface as a child grows up. When we do, school becomes meaningful work. Words like “wonder”, “curiosity”, and “exploration” sound lovely when we attach them to a five year old. Let’s give them their true value. These are the roots of rigorous academic work.