It's time to Learn Outside

This post is in response to my reading from a Tweeted link It's Time to Learn Outside.

As a future math teacher, it is a huge goal of mine to instill respect and understanding, if not love, for nature. Mathematics is a very effective way to understand the world in which we live in, and beyond! I have seen that textbooks have noticed this correlation, but there is something lost in translation when a teacher explains nature to a class reading from a textbook. Unnatural, is my pun-intended way of thinking about it. Your simply not going to get an enriching experience in understanding nature unless their is the physical presence of nature in your curriculum.

Now there is a small amount of this "learning outdoors" happening in public high schools today. For example, in learning trigonometry, many teachers send their students out in pairs with a clinometer to measure the angle of elevation of a tree or some other tall object. Then, by using the angle and the distance they are standing from the object, they can employ trig formulas involving right triangles in order to find out the height of the object. This is fun and all, but it doesn't teach the concepts; it just allows us a simplistic way to use the concepts.

In his blog, William Sterrett writes, "We'll need leaders who understand how the natural world works and how humans are a part of nature." No better place to foster this understanding than outside.