"What would you like to hear? What would I tell you about growing if we were sitting across from one another? What would you tell me? I think of that tarot card. Is it the seven of pentacles? Hard work and harvest, pride at your efforts."
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I spent all of my childhood summers in North Bennington with my grandparents. They live on a quiet, one-way street lined with tall pines. When I started riding a bike, I was allowed only to the end of our neighbor's white fence. Later on, I could venture to the end of our lane, and later still I could take a left onto the back road, as long as I stayed on the paved portion. Beyond was still off limits.
Just a few years later, my friends and I were allowed to ride down the back road and beyond. It was about a mile into the village center for candy and another half mile to Lake Paran, where we ate chips and fast-melting ice cream under a shade tree, and where we stood at the shore, preparing ourselves for the water's shocking embrace.
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"I guess growth is always hard won. It's not necessarily an autonomous process. Well, no. It can be. I mean--plants and trees can grow wild and free, needing only the help of the elements. The beauty of forests comes from this process overlapping itself in all its stages, abundant life and adundant decay."
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The Adirondacks were created when the land forms now known as Africa and North America collided. Their peaks rose slowly over millenia. They were sharp and high, like the Rockies in the west, or the Himalayas in the far east. Over time, they've been worn down by erosion, by water and wind, by changes in temperature, pebble by pebble.
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"But if you want a particular result, some work must be done. If you wish to dream up a harvest, you must put the work in to sow and reap it."
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When I was studying to be a teacher, I learned of a psychologist named Lev Vygotsky and his theory of the "Zone of Proximal Development." Very simply, it's a model that shows how you can't push a student to learn too much all at once, especially if you deny the context of their abilities and experiences.
You must first understand your students through careful assessment and observation. Given the topic at hand, you must discover their comfort level. From there you can push, but just a little. You want to offer challenge but not too much.
Too much can turn a student's enthusiasm off, pushing him or her away from learning. Too little may elicit boredom or, even worse, laziness--offering success too early and with little effort or aspiration. You must encourage a healthy appetite for challenge and curiosity, but also offer the requisite skills and knowledge to overcome them.
From there they can seek out their own challenges. Learning is not an outcome but a process.
This could be said of many things, I suppose.
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"There was a stagnation of growth in your life. You felt as though you were at an impasse. I don't know what you thought or felt. I may never know. Did you lose faith in your own ability to grow, even as you marveled at the beauty of growth around you?"
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A student of mine recently told me, with obvious awe and fascination, that Gingko trees can live up to a thousand years and beyond.
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