Had a conversation with another teacher at Panara yesterday. I was left wondering if what we did in the classroom always had to mean something. We tie everything to a standard, a learning target/goal and keep many of our lessons within those boundaries, but are we artificially limiting ourselves?  Do we steal the wonder due to the time limits we feel pressured to keep?

After the meeting the kids and I went to a local sculpture park. We found this on one edge, a series of what looked like four foot high metal buoys. Maybe they were to symbolize something, maybe placed here for kids to climb on or people to scratch initials into. I wondered if it really mattered, maybe it was just to allow you to make sense of it your own way.

We couldn’t find any description of what the sculpture was all about. I wondered if we let kids climb over it, struggle to read the carvings, pounded on them to hear and feel to make sense of it. Then we come in and add the artists intended meaning if we would have walked away with more.

I wonder if we would have read the plaque if the kids would have just shrugged after hearing the information and moved on. Do we sometimes kill the wonder?