Picking Peas

Have you ever shelled peas? The best is when the string is pulled and it separates the casing perfectly. The peas roll out without anymore effort from the picker. May sound simple but hours of shelling peas whose casings did not unravel in such simplicity leaves your hands sticky and raw from manipulating the casing and then pushing out the peas one by one. Yuck.
I used to spend many summer days shelling peas for my mother so she could can them for winter giving us always the tastes of summer during the ice storms and blistering winds on the Texas plains. I hated the work, but I made games of it much like the one above to get through it. The hours we spent shelling peas were not idyllic, but they did involve teasing and laughing on occasion. Mostly the time was spent complaining about how much longer we had to sit and shell the stupid peas, or shuck the corn with the worms wiggling out of the silky hair, or snap green beans. Hard work but I certainly loved the end product. No grocery store canned goods or frozen vegetables. And since this was before you could get summers bounty all year round, produce selections seasonal.

I bring this all up to say that of course like many things in life we do, we must first endure parts that we do not like. The rewards are gratifying in the end. Why then do we continue in education to believe that everything that is done for the sake of the child's learning, must never involve anything that might be similar to shelling peas on a hot summer evening. I hear the word "engaging" thrown around a lot. First of all that is a value word. Try defining it and getting the same response. I was discussing this earlier and our district wants to place a numerical value on "engaging" and I said as an English teacher if a student is reading or writing which is a very quiet activity most of the time, then they are engaged in my opinion. But what this person wanted was to remove summer assignments from advanced course work because the assignments seemed un-engaging. When the brain is functioning aren't we indeed engaged. And just because the reading assignment may be difficult isn't the doing of it worth the reward that may not be visible until many months or years later? We have become so enamored with the need to allow every child's or parent's complaint about an assignment to be heard that we have forgotten what it is learning is all about. I would venture to ask any successful individual if all of their learning was engaging and fun. What would the responses be?