Meditation on an Orange

I am continually impressed by the students I'm teaching! So often, adults don't take kids seriously. School is about authority figures (teachers) handing down the right answers and students accepting those answers as truth. Who cares about their ideas, right?

This philosophy is the Anti-BELL. As a science course, we emphasize discovery and finding the answers for yourself. As an instructor, I guide the lessons and facilitate discussion and ask questions. I try not to give any answers because who knows if my answers are right?

So anyway, this afternoon was Lexi's lesson on "Orange Meditation." With almost no introduction, we each took a cold, fresh orange and found a comfy spot to sit. For fifteen minutes, 29 high school students sat silently with an orange in their hands. Pondering, wondering, imagining. They took their time to peel and eat the orange. As I sat there with my own orange in my hands, thinking alternately about how strange-in-a-great-way this was and how amazing that high school kids were actually into it, I was impressed. When I was in high school, would I have willingly meditated on an orange? There's so much pressure to be "cool" in high school, and sitting still eating an orange for fifteen minutes is pretty far from "cool."

After we all finished our oranges, we talked about everything that had gone into the fruit: sun, rain, wind, farmers, pickers, trucks, oil for trucks, dinosaurs for oil for trucks, bees, refrigerators, money, and on and on. And over and over again, these kids said: "I'm worried about the world. I want to help."

And that's the "cool" thing about experiential learning--they will help because we're all in this together and we're in it until we discover the answers.