"I teach them to learn with their feet"

On my last morning in Colorado I woke up to a dusting of snow.  How many times over the years I’ve woken up in that very same spot to the sunlight cutting through the windows. And every time, when I wake to see snow I can’t help but have the same of feeling of wanting right then and there to get outside to play. Snow is exciting. I put my coat over my pajamas and looked at my shoe options. The rushed packing for the short trip provided limited options: running shoes, strappy sandals, black danskos.

Damn my feet were going to get wet; I stepped into the danskos, their winning element over the running shoes: an inch platform and no ventilation holes.  Walking out the door, I remembered a pair of too large plastic boots that I had shoved into the back of a closet some time ago. Hoping to find them in the place I remembered, I rummaged through the closet in my old room. Sure enough. Out with the danskos, into the rubber boots.

Single sprigs of green grass poked up out of the layer of snow here and there. The sun had begun to melt the light layer as it warmed the trunks of the trees and rocks. Outside it was beautiful. There is something about sunshine, newly fallen snow and chilled air. My sockless feet felt the cold through the thin rubber boots. I turned to see nothing but my footprints leading from the house, to the barn, to the garden…. My trail in the snow.

I thought about a conversation that I had back in Oregon some weeks before. Halloween night actually. We were at one of Corvallis’s classic dive bars, amusing ourselves with the horrible karaoke, $1 PBR, and creative fashions that emerge one night out of the year. Walking back from the bathroom, I crossed a guy sitting by himself on the stairs. No costume, no drink. As I walked by, he softly said “I like your wings.” Now normally I would smile, nod and keep walking. Instead I stopped and replied “where is your costume?” he answered “eh, I wore it last night.”

He asked me what I was doing in Corvallis; I explained my master’s program and very quickly a conversation evolved not about costumes, not about the bar, or of OSU; but about teaching people. He was passionate about teaching and showing people new things. From my years of doing the same, I’ve learned to see passion in teachers and in students. You can see it most in their eyes. When a person is truly passionate about something, their eyes change when they talk about it.

I’ve come to believe that it is not content that matters most in learning situations but instead it is the experience and it is what that experience invokes in each of us that weighs the heaviest. “I make them take off their shoes and feel the ground” He said. We are so accustomed to walking but how often do we actually take the time and feel what is under our feet? It was brilliant idea. He taught his science by feeling. He had people walk over objects and surfaces and explore what it felt like to the skin on the bottom of their feet. Through this process, he taught about marine life, and forestry and soils all by having people walk across them.

So I thought about this as I walked through the snow, it was so very cold; the idea of taking off my boots was not appealing but even still as the cold seeped through the thin rubber of my boots I thought about the concept of learning with my feet. The tools that we use to teach one another, so many, sometimes on purpose but other times we pass along learning experiences without ever even knowing we’ve done so.