"You can't pray a lie" comes to us from Mark Twain, of course, through the voice of Huckleberry Finn.
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| You Can't Pray a Lie, Mary Ann Reilly, 2012 |
Go read her if you want to wake up from your nap.
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We can hide behind our curricula, behind our rules, behind our cultural norms, but when we teach children anything, anything, not worth the time we steal from them, we sin.
We will be playing with dancing daphnia this week--and some of them will be killed either through negligence or just the stress of being placed on a slide. Some will be squashed, some will suffocate under the cover slip. Some will get too warm from the microscope's light. Some will fall in a drop of water onto the lab table, unnoticed, swirling around as the its world slowly evaporates away.
My kids, many of them jaded by years in a system that sees them as test scores and graduation rates, feel bad for the daphnia, at least once they get to know them. Others will fall in love with vorticella, or with rotifers, but just about all of them will feel attached to life they had no idea existed.
Every year, my kids are much more careful putting their critters back than they were at getting them. The more they learn about the natural world, the kinder they become.
We need to be more careful with what we do in the classroom.