Most people, including me, find that our educational system is flawed. Students no longer learn about the world we live in, they learn what others have learned. In 99% of classes I have taken, I listen to an instructor regurgitate information written by someone else. Now this is necessary in many cases but I know for a fact that, growing up, I rarely got to experience learning in the way that I thought it should be experienced. Ok, I find it to slightly pretentious to assume that people would care to hear me whine about my college experience, so I won’t (you’re welcome). Instead, I would like to share some of what I learned in my class.
That little introduction did, in fact, serve some kind of purpose. I brought up one of my “beefs” with the educational system in order to contrast that to the teaching style I experienced in Dr. Tomlinson’s class. This class has been very different from any other I have taken at Texas Tech.
I didn’t get it at first, now I do. We would go on nice strolls through Lubbock Lake Landmark, the cemetery, Buddy Holly Park etc., and Dr. T would share her knowledge (mostly about birds) and it just didn’t click. My first reaction was cynicism, wondering to myself why I should care about the migratory patterns of a robin or how to pick out the native grasses in the area. The fact was, it didn’t matter whether I cared or not, because Dr. T certainly did. It is very hard to hear someone talk about something they are passionate about and not be enthralled.
I should write a letter to the dean, introducing what two major criteria should be necessary for a teaching position at Texas Tech University. A lot of my professors know what they are talking about, but do they give a damn? All I know is that Dr. T knows the course material and she loves the course material.
Ok, so that’s what I think about the course, now I’m going to share what it meant to me. We pointed out in one of our discussions that one of the biggest reasons that people don’t care about the environment is because they don’t understand how it affects them. This is sad but true. When we were outside learning about living things right in front of us it was easy to care.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, or whatever, but you can’t deny that the world we live in isn’t a gift, it’s a privilege. I personally feel no entitlement to “owning” the earth or taking care of it because it is mine. Over the course of the semester I have realized that it just might not have much to do with us. Those prairie chickens will still perform their strange mating rituals whether we are here or not.
The fact is that we are creatures on this earth also. We come from the earth, we live on the earth, and we will be buried in the earth. This is what we have in common with every living thing. We have also been put in a position in which we can have a negative or positive effect on our home.
Frankly, I never really cared about prairie dogs. The more we learn about something the more we feel that we know it. Nobody wants to hurt something they know. After learning about a prairie dog’s burrowing techniques, it’s communication, and how it can house another creature (like a Burrowing Owl) I felt more of an appreciation and a connection with him. Before, I never really cared when I saw one that had been hit by a car, now I do.
If I am trying to make a point here, it is that in order to save the earth from ourselves, we need to learn about it. People need to know that when they throw a soda bottle on the side of road that it could be there for next to forever. They need to know that cutting down an unsightly tree could take shelter away from several different species of native animals. The best way to inform people is to show them. People won’t learn the same way from a textbook; they are more interested in what their girlfriend has to say or what they are eating for lunch that day. We need to be in nature, we need to be a part of it, and only then can we really experience our home.
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