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As an example of interdisciplinary learning she noted that in Culpeper junior high students are learning about the Depression in math, English and history classes. “They are using the disciplines together,” she said.
Mr. Baumgardner said he had been “ignorant” about issues in education “until my wife asked me to start reading up on learning. The more I read the more interested I was in the ideas in the letter.”
He said the Richmond newspapers are praising Dr. Joseph Spagnola, the new State Superintendent of Education, for his efforts in “shaking up the bereaucracy at the State Department of Education.”
“Educators need to stop thinking in traditional ways and pay more attention to how children learn,” he said.
He said the curriculum committee is not so concerned with the content of the curriculum as with the methodology. “In problem solving you first learn how to learn,” he said. “That applies in the elementary school, the high school, college and the professions.” He said in law school it was not possible to learn all the case law that is needed in his practice of law. “I had to learn how to find answers, how to analyze a problem and how to research it. The same would apply to almost any undertaking.”
In cooperative learning, he said, “Children learn from working with each other, and that’s not true just of students, but of teachers and parents too.”
On interdisciplinary learning, Mr. Baumgardner suggested, “Take history and mathematics and put them together, rather than comparmentalizing everything.” He said he had a friend who is an engineer with no interest in history until he was “turned on to history by reading a history of science.”
Mr. Baumgardner also suggested school activities be “developmentally appropriate. Do not encourage children to fail. Don’t let children be devastated by the idea of failure in early years. Let the concept of play take hold. Apply your principles to the play scenario, and the
See PARTNERS, p. A-3
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