Not Everything Is An Assignment

The most beautiful thing is happening in my anatomy classroom. My kids are in love. The day has finally come - a day that I, and apparently they, have been waiting for all year. You see, I promised on the very first day of school that they would each get the last 4-6 weeks of the school year to do an independent study project of their own choosing. I told them that no matter where I was in the curriculum that I would stop and they would get their chance to take ownership of their learning. My theme for this school year was, "We're goin' outside!" And it started as a way to get my Freshmen Natural Resources Biology class outdoors and actually experiencing this thing called nature they were supposed to be learning about. But then I realized I could take it another step further. "Outside" could mean so much more than spending the class period outside of the classroom walls. It could mean bringing the outside in with guest speakers - industry professionals...

Do you ever have those moments when someone says a particular word or phrase and you get stuck? It's somehow beyond simply resonating. It's paralyzing. You can't continue to listen and process because they've pinned you in a memory or feeling that you can't escape. Why is that? Am I looking for connection? Am I constantly processing a situation or problem and waiting to hear the right words to name it? To solve it? To connect it? I suppose if I am truly being reflective, I understand why it's taken me so long to do this "final" blog post to sum up what this cadre experience has been for me. I like to put pretty bows on things and wrap them up into an easy to understand package, but I'm endlessly messy. I want things to be so perfect, but I'm really a crunched box full of unrelated items I have no idea how to classify and probably have no business lumping together. I wait so long to reflect on a single experience because I seek connections...