Each fall I take our senior class to Hermit Island, Maine, on the coast near Bath, to study tide pool zoology for a week. We set up camp amid birch and pine trees and within the sound of the surf—boys’ and girls’ tents, a couple of picnic tables for a “kitchen” and a couple more for a “dining room.” We stretch a tarp overhead—it rains at least once during the week—and a clothesline nearby. We circle folding chairs around the fire pit and grill steaks.
We talk late into the night. The first night, students chatter and let fall away the social and electronic world they have just left behind. The second night, more calmly, we discuss the world they are about to enter and how to make it a better place. They can allow their idealism free reign, stare into the fire, and imagine how, given a chance, they will change the world. They jump up to sing, they sit quietly to write a poem, they whittle spoons, they—hesitantly—chase skunks away from the food they have forgotten to pack away.
In the morning, students make breakfast—they’re responsible for planning, cooking, and cleaning for all meals. For some, it’s a challenge to get instant oatmeal on the table; others present a restaurant-worthy vegetarian frittata. We hike half a mile to the “Kelp Shed,” a snack bar in the summer and our classroom in the fall, where we meet about 100 seniors from other high schools across the country. Students have come from as far south as Atlanta and as far west as Chicago.
Each morning, teachers from the eight or so schools that have gathered share two-hour presentations on the animal phyla of the tide pools. (I’ve co-taught mollusks for the past three years with a teacher from Vermont.) Students take notes, make drawings, ask questions, and have a chance to examine live specimens they’ve helped collect.
Students are delighted by hermit crabs, intrigued by a sea star’s hydrodynamic tube feet, awed by the relative power of a little clam’s single foot, slightly scared of the crabs’ pinchers—although there are always a couple of students who hang as many crabs as possible from their clothes and skin. Students spend a morning with lobsters, learning about migrations, territorial disputes, mating rituals, and lobster offspring, the superlobsters. Many students name their lobsters—highly unscientific, but understandable—and one purchases it in order to give it its freedom.
The rhythm of life revolves around the tides. We wake in time to be at the tide pools near low tide, sometimes five in the morning. We coach students in walking on the sharp rocks and slippery seaweed, in watching out for rogue waves. We peer into tide pools that appear at first to contain nothing but gray-green blobs.
We’re far from home, we’re tired, we’re not necessarily dressed for the weather, we’re awake when we’d rather not be, we’re uncertain of our footing, we’re cold and wet, and we’re just not sure why we are here. “Dr. Sagarin, I feel like a clam and I don’t want to be a clam. Now I know why they call it ‘clammy.’”
Each year, it amazes me how, within about twenty minutes, our vision begins to clear, and we begin to see and then to identify plant and animal life in the pools. What was, at first, a pool of meaningless shapes and dull colors begins to teem with life. Purple sea stars, green urchins, orange anemones, red hermit crabs, blue mussels, white barnacles, transparent sea vases; once we’ve seen them, we can’t believe we didn’t see them earlier.
We forget our fatigue, our cold, wet feet, and we begin to discover our kinship with a world we have never seen before. We overcome the strangeness of the place and begin to lift rocks and reach under overhangs. With luck, we snag a young lobster or an old Jonah crab, and, gingerly, we learn to hold them so that they are calm and safe. We return them to their holes or crevices. One student finds a colony of large anemones in a tiny cave, and group after group of students approaches to admire it and snap photos. The students name the cave after the one who found it.
It seems to me that this is a lot like education: we leave our homes to go to a strange place and we’re thrown together with others our own age and a couple of adults called teachers. The world makes demands on us—chores, schedules, rhythms, work. At first, at least metaphorically, we’re cold and wet, we’re not sure why we’re here, and we’re not sure what we’re looking at. But, with time and guidance, we begin to see for ourselves and then to discover. A teacher can show us where to stand, how to look, encourage patience, demonstrate how to turn a rock over without destroying what’s beneath it. But we have to use our own eyes, our own hands, and our own minds to make sense of our experience. And then we can begin to explore on our own.
This process, which occurs in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, is transformational and transcendental. No student who has spent an hour in the tide pools will look at this part of the world the same way again; and, by extension, we hope, will learn that other apparently inaccessible, cold, wet, seemingly empty spaces are worth the trouble to get to know.
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