Imagine yourself with a jeep that has a radiator that needs to be patched before you can get away from a batch of bad guys. All you have in your possession is the standard fare of a jeep and some eggs and water. What do you do? In the 1980s the television show “MacGyver” exposed us to the Richard Dean Anderson character that could, supposedly, use the strangest objects to get out of jams. Not one for guns, MacGyver showed us that the ability to use applied wisdom and a keener intelligence than one’s opponent can be the key to getting out of life or death situations.
In high school most of us took (or are taking) science classes and the like which mixed a combination of traditional lecture and “lab time.” When I took physics in high school, for instance, Mrs. Harriet Howe not only went over the metrics of the solar system with us, she also found a unique way to show us the scale of it by taking us outside with balls of varying sizes and placing each of us with our balls at distances from one another that were proportional to the sizes of the planets and distances between them in our own solar system. Seeing the numbers in a book is something completely aside from seeing the proportional relationships in a real world environment. Of course, this is not a lone example. Surely most (if not all) people reading this must have dissected a frog in their years as a student? Done various experiments with Bunsen burners? Constructed pottery from start to finish in art class?
As we move from being children and being able to acquire knowledge through lecture, to becoming adults and thus becoming more experiential, kinesthetic learners we see the value of the way certain things were taught to us when we were younger. As adults, we wouldn’t imagine learning many things without taking a hands-on approach: From learning new languages to learning to work on the Internet, adults are, by their very nature, hands-on learners.
Why is this?
In educational theory there are contrasting types of learning, or “assessment:” Traditional and authentic. Traditional assessment works such that an isolated skill or retained fact is assessed through testing to evaluate a skill or capability that has been learned. Examples of this are readily available in our experiences: Needing to go through rote memorization of technical specifications or some such so you can recall them at a later date. Real world situations rarely call for this kind of knowledge, however. More often than not our activities call upon multiple disciplines and are a collection of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Relevant, real-world situations are the essence of what authentic assessment is.
I’ll admit: I’m a geek. I may not look the part, but for some reason I have been one to take the seemingly mundane details and remember them for later recollection. In many cases, ever since I was a child I was able to soak up material like a sponge and, despite an improper mental state, recall these details for a situation that called for them. I’ve often been asked why it is I have committed to memory such details of subjects that are often on distant ends of any spectrum. From my youngest years, I’ve ascertained, I determined that various types of knowledge would have relevance someday. Perhaps the situations in my life that I was facing at those times didn’t call for the active use of such things as Planck’s Constant (h=6.626 x 10 -34 joule seconds) or how to conjugate verbs in German, but I always told myself and lived by the notion that “knowledge is power,” and later “there is no knowledge which is not power.” Knowledge became a tool from which to develop skills, both allowing me to derive a sense of self-worth, confidence, and personal power from.
When people inquire about the relevance of the mundane details, I often find a voice in the back of my head telling me to tell the person that I am currently engrossed in conversation with to seek relevance in everything: You never know when it might come in handy.
Maybe you, too, will someday find yourself in the situation that MacGyver found himself in above. First you would need to dump some water in the radiator, jump start the Jeep. This would cause the water to heat up. A few minutes later, you would dump in the egg whites which the water cooks. Once cooked, the egg whites naturally plug the holes in the radiator making the Jeep temporarily usable.
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