Patricia Jamie Lee

When classes begin on Monday, the week seems to fly by and my “posting” takes a backseat. Hope your Valentine’s Day was great. I stayed again out in Kyle last night to finish up some work and attend a meeting today.

This afternoon I had to crawl through my class lists and put in a drop slip on each student who had not yet appeared in my classroom. I was surprised to note that I didn’t put a single slip in for my two Basic English Level II classes. The students are learning the structure of a sentence inch by inch, beginning with the prepositional phrase and advancing slowly into dependent and independent clauses. Grammar! It’s so hard to believe that these students who have already spent a semester studying this are still strong, still with me and, in fact, many come in 20 minutes early to practice together, and to chat and hang out. This is on the Pine Ridge Reservation which sometimes offers notoriously poor early educational experiences.

The longer I work with Dr. Rita Smilkstein’s Natural Human Learning Process, the more convinced I am that learning is the most natural process in the world. Like breathing and eating, it sustains us. And likewise, the longer I work with this approach, the more convinced I am that the standard in-the-desk-lecture-and-fill-in-the-blanks approach is so against human nature as to be almost criminal. Learning, when allowed to happen naturally, is never dull-no matter the subject. It is exciting and challenging and the brain releases all those great endorphins until learning even makes us high.

Okay. My questions is, “How did we take this normal learning process and cage it in this terrible way?” Students are somehow expected to open the top of their heads and allow the information to pour into them via the learned expert at the front of the room. My experience tells me learning only happens when the student is engaged actively in the process-and having fun learning.

I started to go into a political discussion about budgets and legislatures but erased it. In my heart, I feel it is a system that must be killed because it cannot be fixed. It simply does not work, and we end up with adult learners who simply close the books because it is too painful. I don’t know what the solution it but I’d sure be interested in hearing your thoughts.

We have Dr. Rita snips on several places on our websites. She is my mentor for the work I am doing at Oglala Lakota College and she is a powerful advocated for students (natural born learners) everywhere. I’ll have Milt help me link up the snips we have produced so far here so you can share them with others. A bit of revolution is in order. Her website is http://www.borntolearn.net/ I strongly recommend We’re Born to Learn and Igniting Student Potential as excellent reads for others who are concerned about Ed-PTSD. I’ll also make available my own year-long graduate practicum report on the use of NHLP with developmental reading and writing students for educators who are interested in learning more.

I just talked to Milt and realized we have quite a bit of stuff on NHLP. Maybe it is time for it to all be on one site. I’ll see if that can be arranged.

P.S. I am writing a new children’s story-more on that later.

Jamie