Nature, Children, and Words: Regrets and Hopes

I had almost forgotten how intense summer heat can induce the feeling of eyeballs steaming in their sockets.  I've felt it again recently.  My glasses have steamed over too when I've gone outside from an air-conditioned space.  We're having triple-digit days and we really need rain.  Dust clouds in the backyard from the lawnmower and from the hay rake in the adjacent alfalfa field provide obvious visual clues about how dry the soil is.

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I wonder if other people obsess as I do  over things I wish I had said, or things I wish I had said differently.  In teaching a Sunday School class last Sunday and in conversations with at least three different people over the weekend, I have subsequently re-hashed and regretted what happened.  These things are not really big enough to follow up on and correct, but they could have been softened, or could have been said more  precisely or more completely.  Dwelling unduly on such things is fodder for craziness, of course, and the matter is best left to God to sort out and redeem.

Writing instead of talking does not prevent all such problems, but it does have the advantage of allowing more reflection in the act of communicating.  Reflection is usually a good way to "cut off at the pass" a great store of potential for later regrets.

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Later . . .

It's raining!!!!!  I can hardly take my eyes off of it long enough to go on typing.  The day is still young, and in the quiet before Hiromi gets up I listened to a short video clip by Richard Louv.  Earlier I listened to an NPR interview with Louv, and some day when I have an hour available I  might listen to  the talk on nature, creativity, and health here.  (Update:  I couldn't resist, and did it as I was starting my day's work.)

Louv grew up on the edge of Kansas City, so he's a mid-western native, and as a fellow-mid-westerner, I'm proud to claim him.  I also really like how he does not ridiculously romanticize nature, he does not rail against activities many children engage in instead of playing outside (although he expresses regret), and he recognizes that some benefits of connection with nature are deeply spiritual.  Last Child in the Woods:  Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder has a section near the end of the book that would have fit in perfectly with our philosophy statement in the science curriculum document we created.  It's part of a quote from a Christian homeschooling mother.  Spirituality begins with a sense of wonder.  That may not be an exact quote from Louv, but it's close.
Louv notes that the same two decades that saw a huge spike in enthusiasm regarding organized sports also saw the greatest increase in childhood obesity and attention deficit disorder.  Concurrently, school-day play spaces began consisting predictably of level, surface-altered outdoor spaces (often paved) or even  more drastically-altered and climate-controlled indoor spaces.  In these kinds of play spaces, those who usually dominate are physically strong or athletically able--certainly not those with a well-developed sense of wonder.  In the worst case scenarios, bullies are born and life becomes more and more miserable for those at the bottom of the pile.

Team sports mania that in other places has become highly commercialized can sprout and grow in places such as gyms and ever-so-carefully-prepared ball fields.  What is sacrificed in such play spaces is the ability to be creative and the ability to build skills that are useful in a cooperative community (in contrast to a competitive one).  Louv and I both believe that this results in out-of-balance childhoods, and that the results are not typically laudable.  Louv somewhat playfully but also dead-seriously describes the results with the words "deficit" and "disorder."  

For about ten years I have been pondering Louv's insights on the importance of keeping alive and nurturing the connection between children and nature.  In the intervening years his ideas have become self-evident to me, and I dreamed often about how schools could help re-establish this connection.  The dreams have nearly died many times, as internal change seemed very hard to come by, and as one by one the choices for our new school seemed to move us farther away from these connections.

In recent weeks I have revisited those ideas in more detail again as part of the discussion about the science curriculum at our Christian school, and I am daring to hope again.   In our teaching of science at the grade school level, we are being very intentional about incorporating weekly times of direct observation and interaction with what is present in outdoor environments.  It takes a lot more "doing" than it would in a less developed area, but we're working hard at finding or creating "pockets" of natural places our children might be able to access. We're not going as far as the school I heard of where students spend six hours in natural areas every Friday, but we're doing more than was done here before.

Credit goes to several past teachers whose efforts I applaud, although I'm sure I haven't heard about all that was done.  One mother told me that when Dwight taught her son, incorporating a lot of nature observation into the time at school, school became manageable again for him.  Before that she was on the verge of pulling him out in favor of homescooling, even though she had no vision for homeschooling.  She saw it as a rescue operation.  Will's own enthusiasm for interacting with nature influenced his students positively.  For several years my set of field guides lived in his classroom as much as they lived on my shelves.  Betty occasionally took her students across the road to play in the shelterbelt, and reported that they did amazingly creative kinds of play in that environment.

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Richard Louv is a journalist.  My years of helping guide students in researching current events and issues have given me a tremendous respect for good journalists.  I can't imagine all the difficulties that such a profession might entail for a Christian, but I have caught a small glimpse of the good that might result from having Christians in such a profession.  I would be very pleased if someone who started their academic training under the Pilgrim umbrella became a journalist.  From what I've learned from Louv, I suspect that this will be more likely to happen if children and nature are firmly connected throughout childhood.  Confidence (coupled with appropriate humility born of wonder), creativity, and good health are great preparation for such a profession, or any other.