Mark London: Have We Reached the End of the Amazon

Tonight I went to one of the Paideia lectures. I was required to go as part of my J-term trip when I will be going to Ecuador (including the Amazon), but I would have attended it anyways because it's a very interesting topic. Mark London spoke about how he had not had much formal science education and how he didn't even know much about the Amazon before he went there. He said he just wanted to do something out of the ordinary, and a trip to the rainforest was about as unordinary as he could think. When he arrived, he just kind of went with the flow and discovered that he had a passion for the forest. He then traveled back to the states and returned to work at his law firm. He told a friend who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times about his trip and his friend suggested they both go there and do a series for the newspaper. Mark thought this was a good idea. However, the Sun-Times wouldn't fund just any trip: it had to be with the formost expert on the Amazon. So, that's that Mark and his friend portrayed Mark as. Then, Mark went to the library and read every book on the Amazon or South America or Rainforests that he could find. He also taught himself Portugese. Then then were able to go on the trip and become famous, yadda yadda.

Actually, the yadda yadda stuff is quite interesting, but it would make this post far too long, so I just want to write a bit about Mark's informal education. Although he knew next to nothing about the Amazon, London realized he had a passion for it's future and that he could do something to make that future a bit brighter. He did this in what sounds like a relatively simple way: he educated himself. The complication is that he educated himself about everything that might pertain to it. I think that, as teachers, we will have students who have this kind of drive, but they will likely all differ in what moves them. As Woolfolk points out, we need to do what we can to support these interests. But, in some cases, they won't fit into our curriculum. This could happen by it not being "important enough" to teach about or, for us secondary teachers, it might not be in our subject area. In this case, I think it would be best if we could somehow incorporate our student's passions into our class. An English teacher could let the students choose what their argumentative research paper is about, or a History teacher could have the students do projects in which they could learn more about thier passions. We will have the opportunity to show our students that interests can span across subject lines.