“There will be growth in the spring.” Chauncey Gardiner (played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 film, Being There)
Right now, in the chill of late autumn, much of the property behind the Tappan Zee High School campus is covered with hay and protective netting covering what will become rain gardens and meadow conservation areas. Underneath this protective covering are a variety of plant seeds waiting to sprout. I took a stroll around the grounds and couldn’t help but envision how beautiful this area will look when spring arrives in a few months (along with the new stadium turf upgrades). These areas are part of the Green Infrastructure Project (funded by the NYS Thruway Authority) designed to help manage rainwater runoff and provide an environmental conservation benefit to the Hudson River watershed.
After I walked the grounds, I went inside Tappan Zee High School to observe classes and gain some valuable insight into how our students are preparing themselves for the future. Naturally, the metaphors of growth and springtime were fresh on my mind after having inspected the site work behind the building connected to the Green Infrastructure Project. While making my morning rounds, I saw students busily engaged in a wide range of activities and elective courses that reflect the talents and interests of each (not unlike the concept of biodiversity from the natural sciences). For example, students were learning how to salsa dance in a Spanish class, making Belgian waffles while researching the Middle Ages in French class, playing paddleball in physical education classes, to name just a few of the activities I saw during my walk-through. My visit culminated in a visit to Mr. Adler’s physics class, where the students were enthusiastically discussing several topics in theoretical physics. The students were grappling with concepts of time and space (familiar concepts in Newtonian and theoretical physics) and in a manner that was largely driven by the students themselves. This was good for me to see since we ultimately want the students to take ownership of the learning.
The joy I was feeling was replaced by a small amount of anxiety when the students asked me to join the discussion. You see, the last time I studied physics was in college when I took a course on electricity and magnetism in 1981. Sure, I scored an 89 on the NYS Physics Regents Exam but that was back in 1979. I was a little panic-stricken when a student asked me, “Dr. Pritchard, what IS time, really?” I stared blankly and admitted that I had no good answer. Then a student responded with an answer that included the word “tesseract” in it and that was when I knew that I was truly in over my head (I must confess that my only reference to the term tesseract comes from my knowledge of the Marvel Comics Universe). I explained that my post-graduate studies were grounded in the social sciences and I was a little out of my depth since my only understanding of theoretical physics was an enthusiastic reading of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (I also watched a few episodes of the TV show, Big Bang Theory on an airplane flight once, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count).
In all seriousness, my final thought to the students was an expression of my amazement that they were training their minds to think theoretically. Specifically, I came to the realization that the students were exploring topics that were not bounded by time, space, and the dimensions of the known universe – just because something can’t be seen or measured doesn’t mean that it can’t be studied. That reflection felt somewhat like one of the simple aphorisms from the Chauncey Gardiner character (from the Jerzy Kosinski novella/script) but hopefully provided some motivation to the students. It was also just around lunchtime and I had a sudden craving for Belgian waffles so I headed back to the World Languages wing.
