A Daisy is Not a Flower (Appreciating Seymour Papert)

It's been a while since I have taken note of a Discrepant Event in my own learning.  Again, I find myself reading a book in the midst of my morning commute to work.  This particular morning, I was reading Seymour Papert's The Children's Machine.  I had been struck, time and again, by Papert's words, written in 1993, and their still-relevant nature today.  My purple gel pen furiously adds highlights, underlines, annotations, and questions to fill the margins of the book's pages while I balance myself carefully between subway stops.  

As Papert makes the case for thinking about the art of learning, mathetics, and its importance, he takes us through a learning journey of his own - learning about flowers.  This topic was a huge stuck point for Papert.  It was as if his brain blocked the material from being learned.  Over time, he began to make connections between flowers and his interest in etymology.  And as his knowledge base grew, he uncovered interesting facts about some flowering plants.  "One night... I ran headlong into the fact that for a botanist a daisy is not a flower."

"WHAT?  No way," my only slightly caffeinated brain screamed inside.  I began reading each page intently, wanting to know more.  I learned that daisies and related plants, like sunflowers, are not considered flowers.  They are called "false flowers" or "inflorescence".  The structure we see, that we call a flower, is actually a grouping of many individual flowers of varied type and structure.  

Staring oddly across the car of the train, focused only on distant memories and mental images of sunflowers, I began thinking about how this explains why there are so many seeds from the flower-like disc of the sunflower.  There is not one ovary involved here, but many.  I think about my friend Christi's love of Black-eyed Susans and Sunflowers.  Did she know about false flowers all this time and never tell me?  I wonder what other flowers are part of this botanical family.  I wonder about how easily I can find one around New York City so I can bring it home and study it under a microscope to really see the structures.  I realize, suddenly, that my stares into space may look a bit creepy, and I bring myself quickly back to the page.

And then thoughts pour in about how this connects to classrooms.  Discrepant events and statements like the title of this post can drive learning.  ​Connections to learning can drive learning for students, the same way it was driving me as a learner on the train.  I was a middle school science teacher for a decade, and I never knew about false flowers.  I taught the reproductive structures of flowers, and I never knew this.  I was excited to learn something new that changed my view and connected past learning to new information.  My brain went into overdrive.  

Papert really summed this experience for me.  "The more complex moral is that some domains of knowledge, such as plants, are especially rich in connections and particularly prone to give rise to explosions of learning."  Narrowing curricula will create disconnections.  Students need time to think and explore topics, to make connections, and talk about those connections so they become real moments of learning, not memorized factoids that will be forgotten shortly following a test.