You Can Learn A Lot From A Weed — Or From GPS

Students use GPS to identify noxious weeds

By ALANA LISTOE - IR Staff Writer - 05/26/06

Students from Helena Middle School spent Thursday using technology to locate noxious weeds at the Lewis and Clark Fairgrounds.

“They constrict other plant’s growth,” said Anna Metropoulos, an HMS seventh-grader. “They take over and don’t let the other plants get nutrients.”

The 57 seventh-graders broke into seven groups, each equipped with a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) device. In a line formation the students walked along the grounds, marking the points to identify where noxious weeds are located. They input longitude and latitude specifications and also noted density information of each weed.

Students have spent the entire year working in the school lab identifying weeds and becoming acquainted with the GPS technology…. Full Article Here:

Here’s a cute little “good news” article with more behind it than meets the eye. I know, going in, that about 98% of Americans who glance at the headline will think, “How boring, who cares about weeds”? Well I can’t make anyone care, nor should I be able to, but perhaps you might just wish to read on a little further and see why I think it has some importance.

Despite America’s current penchant for ‘something from nothing’ … are you listening, Mr. Lay? , true wealth only comes from manufacturing something. At the basis of everything is food … absent food we can’t exist. When the US was young, we became rich because any poor man could come here, get free land and manufacture food. A hundred years ago a majority of the US population were farmers or in other trades directly connected with the production of food.

Today, mainly because of advances in productivity and labor saving, only about 2% of our population directly works in agriculture. But next time you want to dismiss the importance of that 2%, as you click on links at your “day trader” site, or massage the layout of your Google AdSense ads, think about where your next meal is coming from. The US population can’t (won’t) miss many meals; a casual observation of waistlines on the street will confirm that.

Educating young people as to the importance of agriculture and food production is therefore, I think, important. This is essential even if the young become stockbrokers or web designers or airline pilots. We need to know where food comes from and how it gets to our table … it’s obviously more important than sex in many people’s lives.

Secondly I loved this news item because it breaks the stranglehold that professional “educators” have upon our school children. More than 40 years ago I joined the ranks of high school dropouts …in large part because the subjects being taught were irrelevant to life and the teachers were unionized misfits unable to do anything else in society. Today, after more than 4 decades of proof of the value of education, educational technology advances, billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research into “improvements” in education, the high school dropout rate is worse than it was 40 years ago? Why? Aside from the NEA, I would submit that relevance is an even more important issue now than it was then.

Trying to teach middle-schoolers the intricacies of noxious weeds or the math of latitude/longitude would seem a daunting task to me. But giving them some cell-phone sized tools that have displays and beeps and turning them loose in a field seems a lot more like fun the “education” as we have abdicated it to the educational PD drones. But learning will take place, a lot of learning as they explore, and not all the learning will directly relate to weeds and lat/long.

No one knows the eventual outcome when we make learning interactive and “alive”.