Digging Deep: Evolution as Metaphor for Education

Andrea Avery teaches at a secular independent day school in Arizona. Annual tuition at the secondary school is comparable to the out-of-state rate at state universities, though a nearly $2 million annual financial aid budget allows the school to provide more than 20 percent of the students with financial aid. The fenced, suburban 40-acre campus is surrounded by saguaros, not Sbarros. Students are successful and happy in school, and school is students' first choice, not a last chance choice. Having traveled to Brooklyn for the Progressive Education Network Conference, which included visits to progressive schools in New York, Avery describes her visit to West Village's City-As-School. She discusses the differences and similarities between City and her own school as she visited the Hall of Human Origin at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with a group of City students. Avery considers that as different as the two schools are, her own school, and City happen to be two species of the genus school. Independent schools and public schools face different challenges, but both must evolve to better serve students in a changing world. While touring the museum with the students from City, Avery began to realize that the museum provided a rich cache of metaphors to help her think about the work teachers do as well as the changes they would like to see in their organizations. In this article she shares her reflections on her day at the museum and began to realize that teaching is not simply an exercise in filling the skulls of students with ideas or content like so much mustard seed and dumping it out to see how much the skull held. She concluded that teaching is a messy, whole-brain, whole-heart, whole-body, feet-and-hands affair. She realized that to teach is to go, often into the dark places, to venture into the places where the bones lie and start digging. Teaching is to joyfully welcome the unknown and the possibility that what you find could challenge everything you think you already know.