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 finished, Colin was telling me about the work he does behind the scenes for his farm, for example he had to make sure that there was enough grass on his pastures for his stock. If the grass is growing at 10 -15kgs of dry matter per hectare per day in the winter, it is less than the 30kgs of dry matter per hectare per day in the spring which is why you want to time your breeding for the spring so that mother and young can get enough food. 

As I was thinking that this would make great authentic problem solving task for any farming kid, I was struck by the thought of what I was doing. I was trying to turn an amazing experience I was having in the field, into a boring maths lesson. 

So. For Te Karaka Area School, as far as I know (I could be assuming a lot here), inspire is something that is done on Fridays and isn't linked into the rest of the week very much because kids go back to school and have to do "school work" again until the next Friday.

What if school acted as more of a hub, and the real work was based out in the field. Say a kid decided he wanted to focus on farming. Or she, girls are farmers too in this day and age. Lets say this ones called Henry. The school sets Henry up with a farmer, and he goes out and gets some practical experience. He does some fencing. The farmer explains to him what he needs to do. He does it for a few days, but decides he actually needs to do some work on his multiplication and division (for fence posts) and his angles (because he doesn't actually know what 90 degrees is and all his posts are crooked). So he books a day back with the hub. Where some expert tutors are on hand to cater to his every whim. Henry works hard because he knows what he needs to learn but more importantly he knows why he needs to learn it. 

Henry heads back out to the farm, where the farmer is ready to do some more fencing. He is now armed with the power of knowledge and his fence posts are expertly placed the right distance away from each other, and are all at 90 degrees to the ground. The farmer's impressed, gives Henry a wild high five and Henry is stoked.

If schools were more of a hub than a place of torture, we might actually be getting more of our kids through. The hardest part would be developing assessment procedures but I guarantee you that it's not impossible. This wouldn't just work with farming though, science, police work, even teaching. Anything that takes Kids out of their comfort zone, and breaks through that teenage barrier to tell them "actually, I don't know everything"

I admit that for some of the primary kids this wouldn't work as well. Basic literacy and maths skills are important for anyone in this world. But to engage battling teenagers, this could be a key to saving the world.