December 1, 2011 · 10:45 am
Teaching & Fencing: An Analogy
Well-placed posts can support taut fencing for more than 80 years.
Over the years, I have been blessed to work with exceptional social studies teachers: Mike Schmidt, Craig Manwaring, and Elane Catton among them. At some point in our work together, each drew on the analogy of fences and teaching–typically suggesting that teachers were two types: post hole diggers or fence stringers.
Strong fences rely on well-placed, deeply set fence posts. Posts spaced too wide or placed too shallow are unreliable, providing only weak support for wires or boards running from post to post. If posts have distant placement, they cannot stanchion wires against stretching winds nor protect boards against warping rains.
Like good fence builders, good teachers ground students in well-placed ideas–big ideas–and connect those ideas to facts, thoughts, skills, and theories that woven together distinguish disciplines and and encompass fields of knowledge.
Because the integrity of a fence is judged by its ability to contain some things within its perimeter while preventing other things entrance, the fence line must be stretched tight, without slack. The creation of tension, a woven fence tautly drawn from post to post and firmly secured to a reliable post, ensures stability. Likewise, good teaching should be measured by the strength it offers learners over many years of usefulness. If teaching and learning can be analogous to fences and fencing, then effective learning should remain strong over time, provide learners with touchstones of intellectual stability and foster future growth in understanding. Good teaching like good fences provides security amidst the vagary and caprice of nature…mother nature and human nature.
The function of a fence is to contain and protect.
Deep, rich understandings are best achieved when ideas, facts, or steps in a process are connected to foundational structures, touchstones of conceptual essence, i.e., fence posts. Digging deep into the fundamental essence of concepts–conflict and war, expression and art, properties and mathematics–allow learners/thinkers the background to consider growingly complex and novel problems in light of existing models. The existing model–the post hole—has been firmly established. The new information or novel problem becomes the fencing—that which extends and stretches knowledge from post to post, year to year, process to process, concept to concept.
Shallow posts cannot support the weight of fencing or the whim of nature.
Scant or shallow knowledge does not provide learners sufficient support to build complex understandings or applications. For instance, in math, firm understanding of mathematical properties may seem at first to be tedious, rule burdened jargon. But more sophisticated math—matrix algebra, calculus, and complex statistics—requires conscious application of these essential mathematical fundamental rules. Similarly in poetry, full knowledge of sonnet forms allows close reading of poetry that grapples with quatrain and couplet forms, rhymed verse and blank verse, and varietal meters.
But post holes are not just about rules. Understandings of human nature, essentials of economics, development of political structures all bring stability and reason to the evolution of human histories. The integrity of intellect is judged by application and innovation—what one knows and how that knowledge can be used to extend and improve on the status quo—not the mere ability to score well on multiple choice tests. Having a firmly grounded understanding of the hows and whys, the origins and motivations, or the fundamentals within a discipline strengthens the knowledge core.
And yet events of nature and shifts of time readjust posts, misplacing them from once stable positions. Holes find their ways into fences as woven wire ages and time takes its toll. Like posts and fences, instruction and content needs to be revisited as shifts of time and thinking poke holes into human theories and beliefs, redirecting the line of the fence–the boundaries of the discipline, the expanse of the field. Just as the good farmer walks his fence line evaluating its direction, stability, and necessity, so the good teacher evaluates each lesson for strength in the corner post and fences of stability in understanding the field.
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