This is the 4th in a series about our partnership with the Chula Vista Nature Center at Gunpowder Point. These posts will document our progress as we move our middle school science program off campus– to a satellite classroom called the San Diego Bay!
Kids don’t listen. That is my big learning for the week.
Maybe I ‘ve always known that kids don’t listen.
But this past Thursday morning, eight 7th graders from our Nature Center program met at the Chula Vista Boat Ramp and proved it. They could not have picked a more beautiful morning to kayak. The sun was fully above the San Miguel mountain by 8:00am when we met Harry the Kayak Guy. The marina was perfectly still. Tranquil. There were the typical cast of sea-birds calling, the lappingof the water, a distant horn… but otherwise all was serene.
Harry the Kayak Guy had finished the routine pre-boarding instructions: how to hold the paddles properly and how to fit their life preserver and how to get back on the kayak if they fall off and which direction is North and which fish they’ll see jumping out of the water and the many different theories for why they jump out of the water…
Then he veered from the script.
“There are two rivers that flow into the San Diego Bay… the Otay River from the south and the Sweetwater River from the north. Can you say those rivers?”
To which our eight 7th grade students responded with a unanimous and puzzling silence. So he prompted them a little.
“Can you say the two rivers… that flow into the San Diego Bay… that I just mentioned…?”
And one student tugged at his tennis shoe while two girls continued their conversation and a third girl looked out toward the San Miguel Mountain with her eyes fixed on absolutely nothing and two boys pretended to swat each other with their paddles and one child appeared to absolutely strain to come up with a respectable answer for Harry the Kayak Guy.
“The… two rivers…” he started to say…
Then I interrupted.
“Alright, eyes on Harry the Kayak Guy. He just asked you a question… can anybody even tell me what that question was?”
And having struck out on the two river question, our eight 7th grade students now looked me straight in the eyes and sheepishly admitted with their blank expressions that they not only did not know the name of the rivers that he just told them about but they hadn’t listened to his question either!
I was surprised and I was not surprised at all.
Our kids don’t listen.
But neither do the adults.
After all, wasn’t it just this past month that we all witnessed full-grown Americans yelling at each other and threatening and pointing fingers and waving guns and shouting with spit flying and jugglars bulging? Their anger and incivility prevented all meaningful discourse.
If our children need models for how not to listen they only have to look at the adults at Town Hall Meetings!
Fortunately, our students were not likely paying that much attention to the Town Hall Meetings on Health Care.
So I realized in that moment at the boat ramp what I have known for a very long time but never put into words…
We teach children to READ and encourage them to read because it is a life skill that will determine their success at every level… and besides… it is tested!
We teach children to WRITE and encourage them to write because it is a life skill that will determine their success at every level… and besides… it is tested!
We teach children to solve problems and encourage them to solve problems because PROBLEM SOLVING is a life skill that will determine their success at every level… and besides… it is tested!
And even though LISTENING is a life skill that will determine our students’ success at every level and it is one of the 4 main components of the California Standards for Language Arts (reading, writing, speaking, and listening!) … I wonder if we don’t teach it because it is not tested!!!
Are YOU listening?
So teach students to listen:
• To LISTEN with their face and shoulders– sit up straight and face the speaker…
• To LISTEN with their eyes– look at the person speaking to you…
• To LISTEN with their mouthes closed– you can’t talk and listen at the same time…
• To LISTEN with their minds open– focussed, engaged, attentive, active listening…
• To LISTEN as if to understand– like you just asked for directions to a place you really want to go…
• To LISTEN with both ears.
Listen as if your future depends on it. Because it does.
Maybe naming the two rivers that flow into the San Diego Bay will not be necessary to kayak on the water today. Maybe knowing their watershed trivia won’t determine whether our students can compete in AP classes in high school or get into USC or run a business or participate in such democratic processes as… say…. Town Hall Meetings.
But being able to LISTEN when someone is speaking most certainly will. Whether it is LISTENING to acquire facts or trivia or information or curriculum content or important dates or directions or another person’s opposing point of view… the ability to LISTEN is no less important than the ability to read and write!
So we headed out on this warm Thursday morning– Harry the Kayak Guy, Conchita and me, and eight 7th graders determined to work as hard today on their listening skills as their paddling skills. And we started something new. With all of the distractions of being out on the glorious open space of the San Diego Bay… with the sun and water as warm as a swimming pool… with the fish jumping and the hazy skyline in the distance and the temptation to splash water on your classmates while Harry the Kayak Guy is speaking… we know we have to give our students a chance to practice attentive listening.
So now we have “Kayak Meetings.” Whenever Harry the Kayak Guy is ready to instruct the students about the geography or ecosystems of the Bay, we ask that they circle up together and hang on to the kayak next to you. There we sit out on the Bay, in science class, rocking with the waves and working to get better at LISTENING.
On Tuesday we launched seven of our 8th grade girls into the bay. The Nature Center is an extraordinary lab for studying the the marshes and reservoirs and natural bayfront ecosystems, but nothing compares to being in the water itself. Splashing through the mud-decked channels in the shadows of the powerplant. Battling the currents. Reading the tide. Checking the waterproof bird guide against strange-beaked egrets and massive herons. 
So we launched from the boat ramp: Harry, seven students, Conchita (our office manager) and me. Into the calm marina, out past the last moored pleasure boats, a hard left around the jetty, and into the open bay. The day before we had taken seven of the boys so we anticipated a :30 minute paddle across the water to reach the isolated channels on the other side.
I could model the technique for them. And so I did. But they still pushed close to the rocks. So I tried to explain the technique– but now their kayaks were relentlessly pressing against the jetty edge. Then I tried to encourage them… but my voice was muffled by the momentary panic, the surging water, the steady roar, the helpless on-lookers.
Finally, the light bulb clicked on. Maybe they were tired of being so far behind. Maybe they felt a sudden urgency to catch up with the others. Maybe they didn’t want to get left out there on San Diego Bay all day. Maybe it was just a developmental thing– they just needed to practice and fail and adjust and fail some more. But they didn’t quit. And just when it looked like we might spend the rest of the academic year out there trying to move in one direction or another, two middle school girls somehow turned into kayakers and found the rhythm to power across the water and catch the others just as they entered the channel.
And that is the story. And when I shared it with our teachers yesterday they could clearly see the metaphor:
This is the 
It is the first day of school and so our students return. It is mid-summer… most school districts will not call their students back until after Labor Day. Not El Milagro, though. We start early. So ready or not, they are are descending– in droves. Record high enrollment and a long waiting list means business is good.
The Nature Center is our reminder that we are out of whatever “the box” is and our students could be the beneficiaries. 
• SECOND: Beyond basic skills, we would work just as hard to provide a more authentic, thinking curriculum that allows children to discover their natural gifts and interests. A curriculum that features the interesting stuff that engages students every day. Like the Nature Center and all its wind-framed beauty and ocean air; its banks of slippery seaweed, its deep fish tanks that stink. Or the tidepools, tucked snugly up against shallow marshes that splash mud and seawater on kid’s school clothes when the tide is up. Or rare creatures on loan from their fragile ecosystems; sometimes strange life-forms that can make kids smile when they hold them in their hands.
This is the anniversary of my first blog. I have now been blogging for a full year. 59 posts, 147 comments and countless hours and caloric expenditures of creative energy later… here I am. Somewhere.
Gunpowder Point is bathed in ocean breeze and bird poop. It is now a protected marshland in what seems to be the last square foot of undeveloped land in Chula Vista. Bordered by freeway noise to the east, and insulated by acres of natural foliage, the Nature Center leans into that stealthy wind.
And all of this matters. The Nature Center is less than two miles from 
Imagine children rotating through varied learning opportunities over the course of a school day: contributing to data collection and exhibit management, developing individual research projects that make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge accumulated here, serving as museum docents and guides at the sting ray petting area, performing community service to help maintain the sprawling acres, advocating for green energy. Imagine children not just simulating the work of science, but being scientists. Contributing. Developing not just an appreciation for the fragile interdependence of living ecosystems, but a profound reverence for their own place in the world. Here there are owls and sharks, reptile and eel aquariums, there are marshland aviaries, and shoreline birds. There are rare sea turtles. There is an adult bald eagle. 
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