Everything ties back to being a teacher; this "Friday@ EBD" was another thread. We had invited Neha Negi, author of When Birds Talked, to our Meet-and-Greet. An artistic activity was designed in which Neha asked participants to observe and describe mundane objects around them using five adjectives or phrases. Participants shared their observations. There were beautiful connections and observations made by people. It is true, we do forget the mundane. The mundanities that surround us are constant. We discussed a powerful paragraph from her prologue, which noted that we tend to know more about distant lands than about the nature immediately available to us. I was thinking about whether I know more bird names than just crow, maina, pigeon, and bulbul. I do not.
For me as a teacher, this is a powerful message that I'd like to take to my classrooms and teacher training. In the chaos of learning the alphabet and numbers, we forget the gifts we have received from nature. Can we bring this back to our classroom? It is also a reflection of how little we care or bother. As a result, we can destroy it because there is less connection and affection for it.
This week, as in any other, reflections continue, and there is a wonderful group of teachers who meet at Learning Forward on Saturday, where there is an invisible love for teaching, dialogue, and shared realities. I'd like to invite my group to think of all the names of the birds and trees around us before we discuss phonetics and its difficulty.
