So What Did the Elephants Teach Us?

As soon as we were awarded the grant and decided to chronicle our journey and the teaching surrounding the experience, I knew the name of the blog needed to be Elephants Teaching Teachers. Now that we are back home, over jet lag, and I (Karon) have returned from my big family vacation I have started to reflect on the initial concept of elephants teaching us something.

One resounding concept or theme keeps coming back to me.  See, in order to teach or learn from an elephant, a researcher, mahout, or neighbor, must first understand how an elephant perceives the world around them.  This makes me think of our new students coming in, and reminds me that this is my first job as a teacher.  I need to figure out each student's learning style, their preferences for seating, who they work well with, and who is a distraction to them?  Do they feel more confident with their back to a wall, or up front so they don't have to watch the students in front of them?  Do loud noises scare or excite them?  What motivates them?  These are all questions that apply to people and elephants.

Another part of elephant research is to teach elephants the rules of the "game" without having a common language.  I must say I have found myself applying this lesson with my sons a lot this summer as one of my sons is hearing impaired, and thus, language is not an effective way to explain anything.  One common way the researchers teach elephants the rules is through positive rewards.  For clear ethical reasons, negative consequences are not used to tell an elephant they have made the wrong choice.  It is clear though that the elephant is curious about why a reward is not given when it makes a wrong choice, and it is pleased when it gets a reward for the right choice.  What I also saw was that this takes a long time, to teach a concept through positive rewards for correct choices, but there was no aggression either on the part of the elephant.

Through all of this I learned that each animal is as smart as it needs to be given its circumstances.  Every creature is driven by their desire to survive.  What an elephant needs to know is different than what an ant needs to know and even different from what a whale needs to know.  In addition, the skills of an Asian elephant are going to be different than the skills of an African grassland elephant.  Yes, elephants are smart, because their world demands it of them.  Yes, humans are great problem solvers and thinkers, because our world demands it of us.  My job as a teacher is to help discover each student's intelligence and relate it to the world around them.  My job is also to recognize that, although my students come from the same geographic region, their worlds are different, and thus the form of their intelligence will also be varied.  This is not good or bad, it is what creates a world filled with many gifts waiting to be discovered.