Authentic contexts
So I've been up on my mums parters farm for the last few days, and helped out a bit doing some fencing. I've never done any fencing before but I somewhat knew the process so I sort of knew what to expect. What I got though, was a reflection on teaching and learning that was pretty powerful and pretty inspiring. I use the word inspire because that's what Te Karaka Area School call it when kids head out for a day a week to experience authentic learning in the field. While I was fencing I had to count out the distance between two strainers, divide it by the amount of gaps (not the number of posts) that we wanted between them, and then mark it out for Colin to drive them in. We had to make sure that the fence posts were 90 degrees to the ground, not vertical as first thought. They had to be half an inch away from the fencing, and they had have the flat to the wire, not skewed around. It was all pretty technical but I got more and more into it as we went along. When we'd fi...