Your Classroom: Collecting Wood? Or Longing for the Sea?

A Twitterfriend shared this one last week...

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

— Lynn Swaner (@LynnSwaner1) October 23, 2018

I love this word picture.

And doesn't it just capture teaching? Both the good parts, as well as the struggles?

There are some lessons that just feel like collecting wood. (I've had a couple of those in my Geography class lately, to be honest.) The discussions are halting and stilted. The students are going through the motions, doing the tasks and work assigned to them. But it feels like just drumming up people to show up and do it.

And then, there are lessons that feel like longing for the sea. (Thankfully, I've had a few of these this semester too!) The joy of learning is so obvious, so real...it's like you can smell the salt air and feel the wind in your face! And when we shove off from shore, we have a real sense of the immensity of the ocean of content we can explore!

What ships are you building in your classroom? And how are you approaching the shipbuilding? Do students feel that sense of longing, wonder, and excitement for the voyage? Or are they just looking for the next log to drag toward the beach?

Image by Alberto Jaspe [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]