What Did You Learn Today?

It was a genuine, honest question. That came from a great place.

Someone was genuinely interested in my child's day at school. They wanted to understand his world, to make him feel seen and valued and important. All things you'd assume, as a mother, I'd be ecstatic about and grateful for.

But I cringed. Because I knew what the answer would be.

"We didn't learn anything."

He didn't miss a beat. He delivered the words as if he was reading from a prompt in my head.

And then the next predictable question, "No, I mean, what did you do in class today."

"We just played." Saw that one coming.

"But like, did you have math class?"

My son, just six, was becoming visibly irritated by this conversation. As was the person asking the questions. And the reason was obvious - they were speaking two different languages. One was asking, in earnest, from a place of tidy categorized class names with clear work outputs that demonstrated specific learning which could be held up and exclaimed "I learned this". The other? Was learning through play, such that he didn't even understand he was learning, let alone what he was learning, because it was just fun.

But here's the reality. One sat in a classroom and had their learning sliced into neat subjects that dared not bleed into one another. They moved frantically from one worksheet, one textbook to the next just so they could prepare for the next test, hoping they had enough space in their brain to remember everything from this week's learning topics while preparing for a test on last week's learning topics. Flashcards, practices quizzes, MLA formatted papers.

The other child was learning at such a deep level he didn't even realize it. At six, lifecycles were not merely outlined drawings on a white sheet of paper that he colored in to show he understood eggs turned to tadpoles and then to frogs. Instead, he was watching and feeling that lifecycle in real time. He was catching frogs. Feeling how slippery they were. Fine-tuning both fine and gross motor skills to perfect the art of frog-catching to land himself the reputation of best frog catcher in his group. That was the test - besting himself, and his peers. But even if he didn't, they all won merely by the fun of it. All the while, they were counting eggs, then days later observing that, almost by magic, the eggs were gone and suddenly tadpoles appeared. Instinctually, without any prompting from a worksheet, they began hypothesizing about any number of things - where did the actual eggs go? When exactly did the tadpoles hatch because one afternoon there were eggs and the next morning there were tadpoles? How long until they actually looked like frogs? Each day, without any prompting by teachers, the kids eagerly want to check on their frogs. They don't realize they're exercising the scientific method. They don't realize they're learning biology in real time. They don't realize they're learning mathematics skills or even rich language arts by learning different words to describe what they're seeing and feeling.

On one afternoon of frog catching my son slipped into the water completely. The rock was slick with moss - observation. When he tried to climb out he found himself in seaweed - discovery. The seaweed felt....what was the word he used? Peaceful? Poetry. A deep learning, a deep knowing, developed merely by existing in a place and letting it envelop you. His accounting of feeling the seaweed reminded me of moments from Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Even she distinguishes her scientific learning from the education that nature itself gave her.

This is exactly why people are uncomfortable with a child who attends nature-based schooling. Forest school is rooted in play. Play teaches more quickly, and deeper, than any other method of learning but it's near impossible to summarize. Traditional school is rooted in measuring. Everything is defined by subjects. Subjects are broken into periods in the day which are broken down into actions and outputs. Outputs show the teachers, the parents, the school that a student has completed a task - that they 'know' it. A check or an A on a paper or worksheet shows the student knows it, anything else they didn't understand it well enough. It's tidy. It can be tracked, and corrected. Even if a child says they don't know what they learned that day, an output confirms they did, in fact, do something 'of value.' For most of us, we've come to accept that's what learning looks, feels, and sounds like. And anything else is likely to make one uncomfortable.

But I think it's more than just the fact that these kids can't tidily answer the question about what they've learned. I can't help but feel as though the people who ask those questions, once they start to realize what the 'play' consists of, start to catch on, even if subconsciously in a way they will never be able to articulate, that these kids actually know more than them. As Robin Wall Kimmerer would say, these kids are learning the songs of these creatures, the spaces. And even without the conscious thought, that feels like something more powerful than tracing letters on a worksheet or solving artificial word problems.

Somewhere there is a six year old completing a lifecycle worksheet, dutifully counting outlined drawings of eggs, writing the number, filling in words like tadpole on the correct blanks next to the correct image. They'll grow up and never remember that worksheet, maybe barely remember that eggs turn to tadpoles then to frogs. My son will forever remember the day he slipped in the pond while catching frogs and counting their eggs. He won't realize that, with that memory, he will carry lessons in biology, math, language, physics, and more, That he'll grow up with a knowing deeper than I ever had.

Perhaps I should teach him that the next time someone asks him "What did you learn today" he should respond "more than I could ever explain."