Abstract
“Fish tails go sideways. Whale tails go up and down.” I saw these words written on a sticky note on the wall of my wife’s kindergarten classroom. It can teach us a lot about teaching and evolution.
Let’s start with some thoughts on teaching. It was “Flex Week” at my wife’s school. This is a time that comes once a year when teachers and students throughout the school stop what they have been doing and take a week to do something different. Classes typically focus on a particular topic, such as giraffes or robots, and dive deeply into that topic, including perhaps a related field trip or service-learning project.
That year, the kindergartners studied the ocean. To support this theme, they made a mural covering an entire wall filled with colorful fishes and other marine life, as shown in the photograph. They also visited the Boston Aquarium and wrote a...