As Isaiah Berlin playfully quoted, "The fox knows many little things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Originally talking about history and Tolstoy the sorting out of historians and philosophers, his quote has since been applied to all sorts of things. At least in my circle of college friends, since one of them is now (and probably was at the time) one of the world's leading scholars on Isaiah Berlin.
I did a bit of teaching this week and struggled a little to remember how to be a good teacher. I have not been in front of a class of students for about a year except in the most informal of settings. I tried to slow down, not just make my points and move to the next but to watch to see how each idea was absorbed. To emulate what each of the students, fourth graders or middle schoolers depending on the day, was thinking as I spoke and showed images and gave them materials to touch and manipulate. I tried to think of myself as the learner and to see all of the extraneous details in the room and in my room and examples that distracted from the big messages I wrote up at the top of the lesson plan. In a Montessori way, I wanted, though mostly failed, to give the core message and just that message. To talk about nanomaterials required talking about chemistry and plastics and consumer decision making and scientific notation and changing diapers and how oil can stain fabric and constant little details besides the day's big idea that materials' properties can change dependent on the scale of its composition, from macro to micro to nano.
Thinking as a learner, there were dozens of little tangents I could go out on, squirreling away knowledge bit by bit. Or putting it in my fox hole, as the case may be.
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