Don’t you just love it when everyone in class leaves with a nice feeling? With the diversity of students, that can be tough to achieve. However, I’ve found an activity that seems to work. It’s effortless, it’s free, and it’s authentic learning. I take students to the little pond many don’t even know about on the North Harris campus, between the Winship Building and the Student Center, just east of the fountain.
From what I understand, the biology classes have been doing this for years, but for us other instructors, connections to our subjects may not be as obvious. My day classes use the pond to take notes for descriptive writing assignments, and even though we’re only in the heat and humidity for 15 or 20 minutes at the end of a class session, everyone seems to leave happy.
Once each semester, I take students there whether they’re in my Reporting classes or in my Developmental Writing ones. I have them gather close to the pond and jot notes as I give them a couple minutes to absorb each of their senses: What do you see? Now, close your eyes, and what do you hear? What do you smell? Can you taste anything in the air? Touch the things around you; what do they feel like? Lastly, how do you feel inside?
For my reporting students, they have written feature stories about the pond, describing it and including interviews with passersby and people who maintain it. (Thanks to the biology department and its volunteers!) The pond is an innocuous, safe place for my students to start their reporting. It’s also a terrific exercise for them to practice showing their readers through vivid description, creating pictures of the scenes in the readers’ heads, rather than just telling them. The reporting students even quoted background about the pond that they uncovered on a pre-migration Web page.
For my developmental writing students, the trip is their last paragraph-writing exercise. Then, they use the same notes to build their first full essay. For either course, the pond makes a good subject for writing.
It has so much. While there are no lions, tigers, and bears, you can find fish, flowers, and dragonflies at the pond. There are also the rocks, frogs, tadpoles, minnows, water and water bugs, with trees, grasshoppers and birds nearby. Every time, students notice new life there. It’s a calm sensory explosion.
I’m always amazed at how many of our urban students tell me they hadn’t been to a pond before and it’s an experience they won’t soon forget. Some have actually written that stopping by our tiny, man-made pool of water – probably just 10 feet by 25 feet – was one of the greatest experiences they’d ever had.
Here are some unedited excerpts from recent paragraph assignments revealing how that little pond had so much effect on them:
As I stood there, I found myself mesmerized by this beautiful red plant. It stood about five feet tall, and at the top was this gorgeous red flower. Just seeing that flower with the sound of the dragonflies was an amazing sight. That one flower had the power to make me feel alive again.
This was a very good experience, because I had never been to a pond.
I was hungry watching all the colorful fish in the water interacting with each other.
The fish made me hungry for seafood; consequently, I wish I could have eaten breakfast before I came to school.
So, my great experience at the pond was a complete success; I felt so relaxed and calm, like I was in another world.
Taking a trip to a pond and seeing lots of things, such as fish, flowers and birds, was very exciting.
Therefore, being at the pond and learning about it, I felt relaxed and ready for my day.
Being able to go to the pond to see the animals, insects and plants was a great way to start out my morning that day.
Going to the pond and seeing all the plants and animals was the most relaxing part of my day.
The experience was exciting because I saw many critters that interested me on my trip to the pond.
Over by the pond that day, I felt relaxed to see how beautiful it looked with all the fish and tadpoles, even though I was coming down with the flu.
Here’s more detail about the pond itself, in a developmental student’s paragraph assignment, as he submitted it:
My trip to the pond was very exciting. When I got there, the first thing I saw was this big beautiful red fish swimming in the water around beautiful plants next to a turtle and other animals in the pond. Then, I heard the beautiful sound of the birds and bugs around, I was so excited because when I was little I went to a pond in Mexico and a lot of memories came to my mind. Also I noticed a smell of paint and fish mixed together. It’s a good thing I had a fresh mint in my mouth, while I was sitting on a hard rock beside a soft plant. I was very excited watching all these animals living in the pond but I had to go to my next class.
Written by a bilingual, first-year student not yet at the college level, that paragraph is pretty darn good. It is structurally sound – it has all its parts. Here’s another example giving some wonderful description of the pond in the final essay of a classmate, as it was turned in:
Pond
I recently found a great way to de-stress. A visit to the campus pond is free, and it’s close to most of my classes. On Wednesday, a couple of weeks ago, my class and I went there to observe the peaceful scenery. Once we got to the pond I saw, heard, and felt a peaceful mixture of things.
I saw a peaceful scene drenched in sunlight. A huge Texas star hibiscus, about five feet in height, dominated the center of the pond. Two orange-and-white fish circled slowly in the bottom of the pond, ignoring the horde of tiny minnows swimming at the top. Lily pads with purple blossoms covered most of the ponds surface and provided the fish with shade. Off to one side, overtaken by algae, stood a broken fountain.
A mixture of sounds floated toward me. The students talked among themselves over a whir of mid-morning traffic on a nearby highway. The lazy buzz of cicadas grew louder until it gradually became the dominant noise. Had the fountain been working it would have put the finishing touch to the symphony of noises all around me.
I also felt some interesting things at the pond. Feeling the warm sunlight relaxed me to the point where it was hard to concentrate. I stuck my hand in the tepid water and a bunch of tiny minnows began nibbling at my fingers. As I caught two of them, they wiggled around in my hand like slippery half-cooked noodles. These were some of the interesting things I felt at the pond
The soothing sights, sounds, and sensations helped relieve me of the stress I had accumulated that week. The pond is a peaceful environment and a great spot to relax before your next class. The pond is a great built in stress-buster for the campus that you should try out for yourself.
How inspiring! That’s downright ready for college English. (Please forgive that part about his catch and release of the minnows.) While there’s a lot to be said of the need for routine class structure, many students need to occasionally get up and move about to stay interested and alert, and to produce such fine work. And who doesn’t want to get out of the classroom now and then? Going to the pond is one method I’ve used, thinking out of the box of the classroom. You may consider this for an activity or find another gem on campus to visit. Remember, though, our little man-made pond is easy to get to, free, and connectable to learning. You’ll leave with a nice feeling, too.
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Bob Lynch is an adjunct instructor who has taught mass communications and developmental writing at Lone Star College campuses over the last four years. Last month, he celebrated 30 years as a professional journalist for print and online media across the country, including sharing in a Pulitzer Prize.
