I did some serious pondering and researching about education while playing with a caricature this morning.

Bird Droppings September 23, 2026
I did some serious pondering and researching about education while playing with a caricature this morning.

Learning involves memory, so how do we help kids learn and remember? What triggers can we deliberately provide that help those kids remember? I use the terms context and content; how do we connect the two? Over the years, I have said many times: how do you teach life sciences, be it biology, zoology, or environmental science, without going outside? It doesn’t have to be life science only; context and content can be in any subject, giving a math problem, social-studies issue, or poetry lesson enough context for a student to connect the content to life.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from a friend and former supervising teacher for one of my internships in my current master’s program. The principal, whom I had known for quite a long time, placed me in her classroom for an internship. So here I was, Dr. Bird, going into a fourth-grade classroom as a novice teacher. I always felt there was a reason for me to be in that room. Maybe there was some synchronicity in my being there when that teacher needed someone to talk with.

We talked for nearly two hours. She had called because she was struggling with an upcoming lesson in her classroom, but somewhere along the way our conversation shifted. We started talking about how children learn and, more importantly, how they remember. I told her about something I had been pondering earlier in the day: my grandson and an egret.

Several months ago, we were driving across the reservoir when I spotted an egret. My grandson could not see it. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight; he didn’t know what an egret was. He had no previous experience, no image stored away in his memory to connect with the white bird standing beside the water. Later, we looked it up together in an Audubon book. Yesterday morning, while writing Bird Droppings, I wondered about the difference between ignorance and inexperience.

Somehow, during our conversation, the egret became an apple. That conversation became a poetry lesson. I brought up photography and Edward Weston’s famous black-and-white photographs of peppers, particularly Pepper No. 30. He photographed an ordinary green pepper in such a way that its curves can suggest portions of the human body. I was trying to explain how what we see is connected to what we know. Our experiences shape what we can see.

Henry saw a quick splash of white, but he didn’t know it was an egret because he didn’t yet know what an egret was. He lacked the experience and context to recognize what was right in front of him. I got to thinking, and an idea popped into my head: the apple lesson. You imagine asking children, “What is an apple?” Most children will know something about apples.

What’s an apple? Some fruit.

What color? Red.

What’s inside? Usually white.

Taste? Sweet.

Skin? Yes.

Stem? Usually.

The idea was to expand their knowledge, and an easy way is to walk through the local grocery store and pick up a few different apples. I started with Honeycrisp, which we tend to have at home; my wife likes one sliced up for her lunch. Honeycrisp is red and yellow and has striations; it’s very crisp, very sweet, and has a distinctive taste. My good friend chimed in; she loves Granny Smith: green and tart.

That turned into a poetry activity using two or three varieties of real apples, including slices children could taste. Now the children wouldn’t merely be told descriptive vocabulary. They could see, touch, smell, hear the crunch, and taste what they were going to write about.

Now the children wouldn’t merely be told descriptive vocabulary. They could see, touch, smell, hear the crunch, and taste what they were going to write about. Now we are giving the content context, and content becomes memory.  The word tart is no longer simply a vocabulary word on a piece of paper. It is the face a fourth grader makes after biting into a Granny Smith apple. Crisp has a sound. Sweet has a taste. Red is no longer simply red because a Honeycrisp may be red, yellow, pink, striped, speckled, or some combination of all of them. An apple has weight in your hand, a smell when you cut it, and juice when you bite into it.

Then we ask them to write poetry. I wonder how different that poem will be from the poem they might have written before they experienced the apples.

Maybe that’s what I have been trying to say for years when I talk about context and content. We can give children content all day long. We can put words on a board, definitions in a book, formulas on a worksheet, and dates on a timeline. But where do they put those things? What experience is already there for the new information to attach itself to?  Sometimes perhaps our job as teachers is to create the hook.

I started with an idea, and my day has been filled with conversations about learning and memory. I did some serious pondering and researching education while playing with a caricature this morning. A good friend who happens to be the mother of a favorite student from a long time ago had a caricature posted on Facebook, and it triggered my memory, or I should say it was the start of a chain reaction of memories.

Facebook had a caricature meme going on: ask ChatGPT to make a caricature of you and what it knows about you, using your mascot. I knew she had been having a few tough weeks, and she asked anyone to post their caricature, so I did one to post. (I stuck it in here to show where my memory trigger started.

My first image ChatGPT came up with was a frog for my mascot. That seems a bit odd, since everyone else had a dog. I do have a tree frog next to my computer that my grandsons and I raised from a tadpole. I have tree frogs on our pool ladder and by our front and back doors. Frogs are a part of my life. Then it’s a memory trigger, and I was recalling my dog Pansy, who moved to Georgia with me in 1973. I have had other dogs since, but they were always my wife’s, my son’s, or family pets. So here I am, pondering triggers for memory-building context in content so an apple can trigger a child’s memory of poetry. That’s the deeper idea beneath today’s entire Bird Droppings: we remember through connections.

Maybe that’s why my mind keeps wandering back to John Dewey and, eventually, to Foxfire. Long before yesterday’s apple lesson, educators were arguing that children don’t simply learn because teachers tell them things. Learning is active. Experience matters.

Dewey argued against education based on passive absorption. Montessori similarly emphasized learning through experience in the environment. Years later, Foxfire would put many of those ideas into practice with students whose learning began with their own communities, families, stories, and experiences. I didn’t think about any of that when my friend and I started talking about apples. We were simply two teachers talking. But perhaps we had stumbled into Dewey in the produce aisle.

“Why is it, even though teaching by pouring in, learning by passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process.” John Dewey

“Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They can weave a complex web of connectedness among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.” Parker Palmer

“It is through the content of our experiences that we can perform two very important cognitive operations: we can remember, and we can imagine…. Imagination …works with the qualities we have experienced. What was not first in the hand cannot later be in the head.” Elliot Eisner

“One of the potential virtues of situated learning is that it increases the probability that students will be able to apply what they have learned. When the conditions of learning are remote from the situations or tasks in which what is learned can be applied, the likelihood of application, or some would say transfer, is diminished.” Elliot Eisner

Yesterday, none of these began as a lesson on Dewey, Montessori, Palmer, Eisner, or Foxfire. It began with two teachers talking, an egret beside a reservoir, and an apple. Perhaps teaching really is that simple and that difficult. We provide experiences. We help children make connections. We give content enough context to have somewhere to stay. Someday, one of those fourth graders may bite into a Granny Smith apple and remember its tartness, the crunch, a poem, and a morning in fourth grade. Maybe the poem itself will be forgotten, but perhaps the experience will remain. An egret became an apple. An apple became poetry. Poetry became memory.

We remember through connections.

The idea that imagination needs a basis in reality and context is significant. Imagination brings meaning, purpose, and application to what is learned.

“If students are not given access to metaphoric learning activities, if the shape of their learning is always linear and closed, how will their capacity for creativity and invention be developed?” Thomas Barone

Perhaps in my research and reading, I am getting a bit overboard with Dewey and education, but I see tie-ins to daily living, how we respond to others, and what the future holds for our grandchildren and us. If each of us took a bit more time to understand why so much of what is going on in society is happening, maybe we could finally realize that much of it doesn’t need to be happening. So again, after nearly thirteen years of daily writing, I ask, as I do every morning, please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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