On June 8, Kelly McDurmon and I traveled to Asheville, N.C., to attend the Project Connect conference. While Kelly had gone to earlier conferences when they were hosted at Lovett in Atlanta, this was my first opportunity to go and I was very interested in how to merge other subjects with history. The focus of the conference was not just to show what the Asheville School was doing, but to showcase the theories behind interdisciplinary work.
On our first night, the keynote speaker was Dr. John Lawrence, who has been a cardiologist for many years and now teaches courses in humanities and medicine at the Asheville School. His talk centered around the fact that that there are attributes of great doctors that do not simply come from knowledge of craft.
To be a good doctor, you need to understand that suffering is a universal experience and sharing that with patients -- to be able to empathize with them is a key to helping them. He also added that "the future belongs to the synthesizers," those that are able to combine and adapt. I believe that through many courses at Darlington this is our goal as well; to not simply teach a subject, but train the mind to seek a synthesis of information and to create something new from the pieces.
Dr. Lawrence also said, "The meaning of life is to find a gift, and the purpose of life is to give that gift away." For teachers, this gift is passion. When we had the pleasure of hearing him speak the next day on his course that he co-teaches, it became very evident that the passion for discovery and evaluation was something that he freely gave away and I am sure many students that have left his class with these principles. The self-described goal of the course was to introduce future doctors to the humanities. However, the more common outcome was that humanities majors were being introduced to medicine. I think this happy accident is the true benefit of what Project Connect was all about.
In another presentation about science and art, I thought of several lesson plans that I will be attempting this upcoming semester. It became clear to me that when I teach about ancient Egypt and the Nile, there are a lot of moving parts into which I could delve further. It is a fact of history that Upper Egypt (south) was the more industrial half and Lower Egypt (north) was the more agricultural. In taking a scientific focus, students could learn that as clay and silt travel down a river, the particles get smaller in scale; however, their large surface areas allow for more nutrients to be captured and transported. This explains why the upper part of the river has clay that is better for manufacturing than the lower part of the river and why the lower part has better clay and silt for agricultural than the upper river.
If you also incorporate the ability to handle different types of clay, you can see that not all clay is created equal, as Mrs. O'Mara will tell anyone working with clay pottery. With this in mind, you engage the brains of humanities-oriented, science-oriented and art-oriented brains in a single discussion.
At the end of the day, the purpose of the conference was to show how trying to incorporate information across disciplines allows students' minds both to make connections and to incorporate the unfamiliar with a familiar subject. In so doing, we may be able to help students make connections that lead them to find their passion in a subject or place they didn't expect.
