How thrilling it is to learn new things

This post is adapted from an email originally shared on April 26, 2024. If you would like to receive future emails, you can sign up here.

My family and I frequent a park near our home that I love so much we call it “mama park.” It doesn’t have a playground, but it has open space and intersecting streams; we pretend it’s the backyard we don’t have. With my penchant for turning leisure into projects, this January, I decided to adopt five different trees at mama park for the year. I used an app to learn what these trees are called and read up on the origin of their names and whether they are toxic to humans. I visit the trees every Sunday; I record notes in a tree journal about changes I observe, and I log photos and study the changes from one week to the next like an arboreal detective.

Let me tell you, April has been wild. The maple faked me out by seeming to produce leaves early, but then those leaves all dropped and the real leaves emerged. Within two weeks the cherry trees went from sporting hundreds of flowers to hundreds of baby cherries. What I thought were two hollyhocks sharing a trunk turned out to be two totally different trees.

I feel like I am learning deeply important things from these trees. Not only am I learning the fundamentals of plant life, I am learning how to see what is right before me in new ways. Watching these trees closely has changed the way that I have watched the rest of the natural world explode this spring. I still — of course — know such a tiny fraction of what can be known about them, but what I have learned has opened up a world of new curiosity.

As an educator, whenever I learn something new and important, my brain goes straight to the implications for the education system. Should I have learned more about trees in school? Is there something about the way I am learning about these trees that should have a stronger role in pedagogy? Or is it the successes of my education that prepared me to keep learning?

But beyond the questions, studying five trees has reminded me how thrilling it is to learn new things. I wake up giddy every Sunday. I yell my findings across the park to my family like they are breaking news — with astonishment and pride in what I have discovered.

I am struck by the contrast between the thrilling and joyful feeling of learning something new and the frustration, exhaustion, and grumpiness present in so many conversations about how to improve education. When the core business of education is helping kids learn, and learning is such an awesome and joyful experience, why isn’t there more delight and wonder in learning about how to improve schools?

It is easy to get exhausted by all the problems in our deeply imperfect education system, to be overwhelmed by the competing tensions between the purposes people want education to serve, and to become cynical about the prospect of meaningful change. For all my current passion about these five trees, I have no interest in facilitating a debate about the role studying them should have in schooling. I see all the ways the conversation could become a political quagmire about competing priorities for time and money and resistance to top-down mandates. In this context, I see and feel all the ways we get lulled into thinking that the project is doomed or that we just need to blow the whole thing up.

But, in the face of a powerful personal learning experience, I find it hard to be cynical about our capacity to learn new things — even hard things like how to improve the education system so it supports each and every student.

The joy I’ve experienced studying these trees makes me wonder if there is a different stance that would bring more energy to the project of improving education. What would feel different if we saw the effort to improve schools and learning outcomes as a set of fascinating questions rather than a to-do list of failings that should have been corrected by now? Would we sit in the complexity more? Would we observe the impact of reform efforts more carefully? Would we celebrate what we are learning more, even from the things that have not worked? Would we stick with the questions longer?

I also wonder if there is a different stance to our own learning that could lighten our loads. Instead of beating ourselves up for the ways we should be better at facilitating a tough leadership meeting or designing internal communications systems, would we be better served by marveling at the questions about what makes it hard and enjoying the opportunity to learn to do it better?

A few months ago, I wrote to you about my belief that “boring is important.” But it turns out that things that might seem “boring” rarely actually are. Five years ago, I would have thought that watching a tree grow would have been dull as rocks and now — well, now, I think rocks are probably pretty interesting too.