Through the Looking Glass- A Jeweller's Stange Loop Exploration

Through the looking glass I tumble down from Brobingnag into Lulliput. I leave behind the titanic shell and fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall,, fall……….

 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144… A skipping game of layers built on top of each other. An exo-cranial home. Skeletal blueprint. Tectonic fractures interrupt the architecture, interrupt the strong natural ridges with instability. Did the owner feel the cranial earth move? Surface craters mimic the moon. Are these natural hiccups in the calcium carbonate skipping game? Are these natural bruises experienced in the submarine environment? Briny spice mixes with gritty soil and flossy web.
 

 With the jeweller’s loupe, I begin to see the Strange Loops in the natural world. Science and math working together to create a Fibonacci skipping game across the ridges of the shell. Science and math are a Strange Loop. Can science exist without math? Can math exist without science? They are the same thing and yet they are not.

 A square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn’t a square.

The jeweller’s loupe reveals the Droste effect present all around me. I look at the shell and see a shell in a shell in a shell in a shell in a shell in a house in a house in a house in house in a world within a world within a world within a world within a

 The more I look the more I see. The smaller I look the bigger the world gets, THE BIGGER THE WORLD GETS!!!

I’M OVERWHELEMED

because everything is connected and everything depends on and is everything else.

 

Climbing back out of the lens and into the big picture, seeing how the little fits into big, and fits and fits and fits again, I wonder…

…if this is true, which it is, then why must we compartmentalize, organize, ghettoize our learning.  If the big picture and the small picture are really the same but different, because one is within, within, within, within the other, why do we

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 what we are learning? Why do you subject-ify the learning? If the natural world is integrated, should not our learning be fractally integrated?

 Cuz the curriculum’s connected to the… whole world. And the whole world’s connected to the… science. And the science is connected to the… math. And the math’s are connected to the… reading. And the reading’s connected to the… writing. And the writing’s connected to the… speaking. And the speaking’s connected to the… history. And the history’s connected to the… whole world. And the whole world’s connected the… curriculum. Now see the learning of the world.     

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I try to explain to wondering parents that I integrate the subjects in my classroom… that in learning science we are also learning math, that in working on word study we are learning the mathematical patterns of language, we are learning patterning and patterns are in everything we do. Parents who were taught in a pigeonholed system have great difficulty taking the little picture and applying it to the big. I was taught in a pigeonholed system and regularly have the same trouble.

If, as a teacher, I allow the students to follow their interests and curiousities, or as a class we pursue each students’ questions, there is always a convoluted way that this can be woven back into what “we should be learning”- the PLOs of the curriculum. We all are curious and ask questions for a reason. As animals, curiousity and questioning help us give meaning to our world and help us figure out how to survive. So the pursuit of these questions and curiousities leads to authentic learning and education.

Looking through the jeweller’s loupe and exploring the worlds within our worlds helped me to focus the lens on more authentic learning. I was as enthralled with the Lilliputian worlds as I know my students would be. A million questions and curiousities burst into my mind and one question spawned a million more thus perpetuating the Droste effect of learning.