Schooling in a collaborative environment with a collective vision is no small task in any time, and that’s probably ten times more apparent in the middle of the pandemic. The educational system we’re used to, in spite of owning its share of flaws, is a monumental invention and a well-designed piece of community engineering. We can’t just dump the design we’ve had and expect it to work well in another context — especially in the midst of disease, job losses, structural inequalities, and limited resources.

I wrote about how I think we should forgive ourselves and not expect so much from at-home, online education. In fact, I think that this gives us a chance to think about what we really value about education and what goals we might have in mind. Mostly, though, let’s stop expecting that anything at home can approximate what we have at school. I think that’s silly and we shouldn’t abuse ourselves trying to do more than what we can expect of the current situation. (Writing that piece helped me a lot in trying to figure out some things, and I’m happy to talk with anyone more about our big educational ideas and ideals.)

But this brings us to another question: What can we do now? What can our students do? If education isn’t the same, then what is it, especially in light of trying to get kids to engage in authentic science, its questions and practices and general engagement with the natural world? As I think about what we’re trying to do with school science, it’s clear that we want to make it more tied to authentic science; so if we move school online and at-home, how can we make sure that we’re just not moving science further away from authentic practice, wonder, and the natural world?

I got inspiration from Billy Barr, described by some as a hermit, who’s spent 50 years living in solitude in the Rocky Mountains. I like Billy, especially the fact that he admits that his lifestyle and how he does it is pretty individualized. We can’t all imagine that we would want to live like him, nor that we would would do things exactly the same as him if we were in his situation. But one thing that I really appreciated was his idea of record keeping, to keep track of something, as part of his daily routine. In his case, some things that might seem really mundane have become the basis of longterm scientific study, even though he never aimed for that.

This makes me think about our own homes. Instead of taking something that we would want to do at school and re-engineer it for all of our kids at home, all separated from one another, what if they each had their own agency to notice, make observations, and collect their own records? How can they connect with their own, personal worlds?

I think that one of the hardest parts of doing science is the beginning: How do you start? You can’t know how to start until you become familiar with something and get inside of it. In Billy Barr’s case, he started measuring snow depths in the1970s simply because it was a part of his space and because he wanted something to do. It might have actually helped that he was isolated, because it gave him a focus on his unique environment. By tracking those levels over the years, his data eventually because useful, decades later, in climate science research. He’d never intended this in the beginning; he just happened to be in the right place and mindset to collect those data.

Perhaps more important than keeping daily records, Billy is especially familiar with his environment and is especially attuned to his surroundings. Too often we ask budding scientists to come up with an observation and a question and an investigation all prematurely, before they really get a feel for what they’re doing. I think it’s important to really be immersed in and familiar with a phenomenon, paying attention to and playing with it before we can really know how we’re going to investigate it.

So, I want to suggest that our students at home can take the lead in their immersed and isolated environments. What kinds of noticings and immersings can they take part in? They’ll come up with better ideas than me — and they’ll connect better with their own ideas than with mine — but I’m thinking of things like:

• which way does the wind blow today?
• how dark is it at night?¹
• how tall is the grass?
• what time does the cat wake up to eat?
• how many drips of water from the faucet are there in a minute?
• where does the sun set each evening?
• what does it smell like outside?
• what do you hear in different spaces?²
• how does your dog take a step with each of its 4 legs?
• how many blossoms are on the tree today?
• how far can I see today?
• how much did it rain today?
• how many birds do I see?
• where are there cracks in the sidewalk? what do they look like?
• etc.

I know there are more and (I think) students will come up with observations that are especially relevant to them. I can imagine that they can use those experiences to develop their own questions, in their own culturally and physically relevant spaces, and that these can be (eventually) used by a teacher or a group to develop investigations and tie to modeling.

This is simply an idea, and I’m interested to hear what others can do (or would refuse to do) with it. Most of all, I want to shift focus when we ask people to do science at home and get a better, more authentic idea of what that could mean. I don’t think we need to force it into a curriculum that we’d imagine in our school buildings. It can, and probably should, be different.

Most of all, as I’m writing this during a pandemic, when we’re all vulnerable and beleaguered, let’s be kind to ourselves and to our students. Right now it’s enough to make it through each day. Maybe that can be a little easier if we can focus on the little things that surround us.

1. I’m working on a way to study light pollution. Here’s a link to a form with some instructions and other information. I’d be interested in having others try this out: https://forms.gle/YuvWRUEaZx6shx4FA ↩
2. Canyonlands Field Institute, a favorite educational organization of mine, has this lesson on creating a sound map: https://cfimoab.org/create-a-sound-map/. For an at-home project, I might do something different, but I really like notion of creating a map that models what sounds are like in different spaces, and trying to figure out how to represent those. ↩