Galileo’s Dream: Wonder at the center of the classroom

There’s something that’s been bothering me ever since I began my education degree a year ago. I hate to admit it, since it dates me as someone old enough to have attended a traditional classroom decades ago, but the more I’ve been forced to “reflect and connect” my learnings to personal experience as I’ve done my coursework (the newer paradigm for how students effectively learn), the more I’ve come to hate the process. At first, I thought it was because this approach was new to me — I was simply unpracticed in the art of formally verbalizing the goings-on in my brain as I was exposed to new ideas, a novice in making my own real-world connections in real-time. Then, as I continued to be asked to “reflect and connect”, I thought I hated it because it didn’t seem to be helping me retain the information that was being taught. Penultimately, I began to suspect it was the monotony of the repeated process that drained me, the fact that I wasn’t born to be a teacher, or that I was simply not the enthusiastic learner I remembered being as a child anymore. This thought discouraged me, as I do not want to be an uninspired educator for the rest of my not-even-begun career. No, let me be more clear; the thought that I was an unfit teacher and unenthusiastic learner thoroughly depressed me, considering the time and money I’d already invested in my education degree. Where had I gone wrong?

The more I thought about it, the more I dug into my own past to try and rediscover both my joy for learning and the answer as to why my education program didn’t seem to be providing fuel for that joy. That’s when it hit me: when I thought back to my most engaging, fulfilling moments in learning, the thing I loved about them wasn’t how they related to me or what I already knew, it was how they helped me discover something bigger than me or anything I’d ever thought about before. More succinctly, these moments piqued my sense of wonder.

Wonder has been defined as a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. Yet somehow, the art of teaching as it is being taught to me seems to be devoid of this word or phenomenon. In continually drilling the importance of self-reflection and connection, we seem to be eliminating the possibility that students will ever be surprised by what they find (since all answers are personally constructed), or have an external focus to admire. Though I’m not suggesting we completely abandon the student-centered model and return to a teacher-centered classroom, I do wonder if, in our rush to ensconce each student at the center of their personal learning universe, we do them a disservice. Are we creating metaphorical geocentrists, unable to see the truth of the wonders at the center of their experienced universe for the fact that they haven’t been taught to lift their eyes from the “planet” they inhabit?

I don’t claim that mine is a vision of the future, indeed, I’m likely to be branded a heretic, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I am a student teacher in waiting, keeping my eyes open for a dream, for the educational Galileo who will describe to us the laws that govern a learning universe where wonder is the center around which both student and teacher orbit. When you see her (or him), please let me know.