Second Day of Class

The "Forest Classroom" in the Kasiisi-Weston Nursery in Uganda, Africa.

On the second day of class, the class (for a lack of a better word) discussed the first and last chapter of our University Colloquium textbook ("Love It or Lose It" and "Nature-Deficit Disorder and the Restorative Environment") and two other articles, one by Wallace Stegner and the second by Ursula K. Heise.  Each author was trying to give their own solution to our society's apathy toward our environment and planet as a whole.  Professor Otto used a wonderful version of Think-Pair-Share in order to split up the four articles' information and engage the class in an intelligent discussion on the topics.  His plan worked quite beautifully; the entire class was completely engulfed in deep deliberation for most of the class time.  I even learned a couple of new things, like Orr's "Biophilia Revolution" and Heise's suggestion of global connection.  However, what really stood out to me was a concept in the article that my group was assigned.  At the beginning of "Love it or Lose it," Richard Louv talks about ADHD children in the classroom and how nature (or his meaning of the word "nature") can help sooth the hyperactive symptoms and get children, over all, to focus in the classroom.  Of course, since I am an Elementary Education major, this idea immediately captured my attention and one of the many ideas that stuck with me when I left class that day.  I began to wonder if I could use that knowledge for when I get my own classroom one day.  Maybe I could take my students on more field trips to nature-like places and maybe having a terrarium (or something like it) in my classroom for the students.  It wouldn't be like I would distracting the children from the curriculum since students need to learn about habits and such at the Elementary level.  That's when I started to think what necessarily counted as nature and what didn't, which when shared with the class brought us onto a 20 minute tangent.  Yes, defiantly a fun class.