Questions 1 -sm

1.Aristotle’s main contribution to the classification of organisms was his way of making sense of nature. He put them in different groups (blood bearing and bloodless) As he went on he began to see that his clearly assigned groups began to get muddled (like the Iowan in the other reading for this week). Aristotle’s and Phiny’s natural histories include wonder people and dragons because they had never experienced the animals and nature themselves. I thought of it, in order to for this to feel like it had context to me, how you imagine your dream man or woman to be when you are younger and how they are actually are when you meet them. Some things are exaggerated in your mind, while other things are more wonderful than you could ever had imagined. When you have not encountered that special person they are recognized equally with other well-know animals because they are simply man or woman, to use my example again.

2. There was an urgency to classify the diversity of life in the 1700’s because explorers were visiting the coasts of Africa, Asia and the Americas and finding species they didn’t know that existed. They needed to update their knowledge so that it was homogenized with other countries and also so they had a complete collection to themselves. They needed to make sense of their world again, so organizing and classifying it was necessary to create order. Linnaeus was called the “Little Oracle” because of his rich and powerful ways he described the world around him. He validates that nature should be ordered by our own perceptions.

3. “Natural History is a practice…not a body of knowledge” by Tom Fleischner and also

John Horner talking about standardized testing in K-12 education and how it has no room or no way of testing natural history. He is asking ‘how do you measure wonder and curiosity?’ I also enjoyed the natural history definitions by Gabrielle Roesch speaking about how we learn not what we learn and how everything is interconnected. The word interconnected was used by many of the definitions on the website. Sarah Rabkin takes a little more of an anthropological definition of natural history with her description, “It teaches a kind of humility, and also it teaches us to be grateful for, and appreciative of, what we have. Because I think the people who are trying to save the world and are so scared and desperate about what we're losing, understandably, miss the point and will never succeed unless they can also be joyfully appreciative of what we have.”

I feel like all of the definitions I thought interesting relate to each other. They are all about the act of natural history or how we learn and appreciate. Fleischner, Rabkin, and Roesch are concerned about the “practice” of natural history and the importance of “doing” natural history and not merely observing it. It seems they are kind of anti-zoo in their approach because they are like “hey, you can find a zoo in your backyard, if you would just take time to practice and observe it”

In relation to my own practice, Horner spoke to me personally but also commented on the acts the individuals I quoted were speaking of too. Horner questions standardized testing and how curiosity and wonder fits into the curriculum of K-12 education. If our schools are spending a lot of their time teaching for standardized tests that allow the school bigger budgets for high scores, then were does creativity and exploration fit into the school day? What kind of minds are we creating for our future?

4. From Dillard’s Seeing I clung to the quote from a patient who could now see for the first time after surgery from Space and Sight (1960) by Martius von Senden. The patient described the square object being a square not by sight but by the ridges that gave the square object form. After the surgery the doctor gave the patient the same square to identify by only using sight and the patient couldn’t do it because it didn’t have any visual context for the object. One patient, maybe the same one, described lemonade as being square because of how the flavor felt ridged on the patient’s tongue like the square cube had felt ridged before upon feeling it.

            I feel like the quoted text’s discovery is significant to natural history and as well as this week’s observation because it makes you remember that everything you know is from observing – that there are very few things that are inherent to us and also took not take for granted where/from whom/how we get information, In my observation for week 2 I am looking at a vegetable that I have never encountered before and without tasting it and without some source of information telling me that it is a food, I would not be able to share the starkest qualities about it. 

-sm