When is the best time for kids to take piano or skiing lessons, or learn a foreign language or how to read? When Mom asked the teacher about piano lessons for me, I was present. The teacher asked me a few questions before answering my mother.
"Do you like to play the piano?" "Have you figured out any tunes you can play for me?" "Do you like to listen to music?" "Tell me about the music you like?"Somehow I had thought when my mom first asked me about piano lessons that the teacher would probably check to see if my hands were big enough and if my feet could reach the floor when I sat on the piano stool. It seemed to me that all the teacher really wanted to know was if I were really interested in the piano. The answer to the question about when to start piano lessons is "when there is a natural and sustained interest."
My wife has just discovered World War II. She admits that the information has been there for a long time but she wasn't interested. She took the obligatory history classes in elementary school, eighth grade, 11th grade and the obligatory history class at the University of Utah. She has heard her father's stories of working in the shipyards during the war and my dad's stories of working for U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany as a translator/interpreter. These first-person accounts have been around for a long time but didn't seem to whet any sustained interest.
It may be that the traditional courses just presented information to be "learned" and repeated on a test. The war didn't involve real people in real quandaries. There may be no intrinsic interest in the facts of World War II as long as it is something to be learned and not a human experience with real people. Maybe she just wasn't ready to learn.
She is hard pressed to explain this new compulsive interest. It is just interesting now and wasn't then. Now there are books to read, lectures to attend, encyclopedia articles to review, and each answer seems to suggest a new question that requires an answer.
She might even agree that sometimes education is wasted on the young.
John Hendrickson retired from the Snow College faculty two years ago. In his spare time he has decided to learn how to read music. He bought an old 12-string guitar from a friend a half century ago and learned to play by playing. He admits now that he would be way ahead if he hadn't waited a few years after getting the guitar to buy a guitar book.
Why learn to read music after retirement? "I've composed lots of songs over the years that I want to put down."
"Do you plan to publish some of them?"
"No! I just plan to write them down."
Music was there to learn for over a half-century, but the interest wasn't. It isn't a question of needing to know. Hendrickson never did need to know how to read music, and my wife still doesn't need to know about history unless we apply some new definition to the word "need."
In a Bible as Literature course this past quarter, I taught students to recognize parallel poetry in biblical literature and to recognize the formal qualities of the lament. The assignment to test what had been taught was to write a psalm. A student who claims never to have understood poetry or tried to write a poem took on the psalm assignment with vengeance. He wrote an essay on the formal properties of the psalms, composed a dozen very good psalms and is now trying to figure out a way to finesse his major so that he can do graduate work on biblical poetry.
In the same class are students who went through the motions of writing a lament to fulfill the assignment but were obviously not ready to learn the concept. It is lamentable to me that some may never be ready to learn about laments. It is something I get excited about.
We can't expect to catch students only when they are interested. We can't build a curriculum around waiting for interest to build before concepts are taught. What we can do is be alert for teaching moments when students are interested. We can also try swimming upstream and remind students that sometimes when they let themselves go that they can become interested. I suppose that even if it does no good we can retain our integrity by encouraging students to quite "taking" the class and try "investing" in it instead. They may be able to make themselves ready to learn.
Roger G. Baker is associate professor of English/education at Snow College. Comments or questions about "Learning Matters" may be addressed to Roger Baker, English department, Snow College, Ephraim, UT 84627.