100 Days of Wonder – #6

I love this picture of me from our first trip to Florida. It’s nearly 19 years ago. It was our first full day and there was a whole load going on. I didn’t have any frame of reference or know what to expect. I hadn’t given Disney, theme parks or any of it any real thought, I was tagging along for the winter sun. We had walked up Main Street USA and I was in awe, overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of it all. There was a sort of wonder but it was tentative and not joyful. But then we came to the Winnie-the-Pooh ride and area around it and my brain had something to work with. Pooh bear and friends I knew, I’d been in and out of their stories and on adventures with them for years. Even now I remember a sort of relief and joy washing over me as I finally let my brain let go of reality and jumped into the 100 Acre Wood (trying not to bounce, didn’t want to upset Rabbit) and immersed myself in the story. Disney World, it turns out, is is just allowing yourself to jump in and out of stories. But there’s a lesson here for teaching (and for any sense making work): Our brains need something to work with. We need some sort of frame of reference. Something familiar (a base camp?) from which we can set off into new adventures of learning. Without the security of something familiar, things quickly become scary and disconnected – they don’t make sense. The familiar within the new allows us to test what this new world, new story is all about before diving straight in or taking tentative steps out. Even after all these years and several trips, the Winnie the Pooh ride is still my favourite and it’s still my go to place for a moment of familiarity and calm but I also often picture it as an anchor point when I am trying to work out how best to teach something – I need to help students find their own 100 Acre Wood in the middle of the hundreds of stories I want them to learn about so they can go and safely and joyfully explore a whole new world (yes Disney Pun intended).