My “Mr. Rock”

09Jan11

Say “Hi” to Mr. Rock, A C’mas Gift From My Dad!

While visiting my parents recently (one is 97 and the other is 96 soon to be 07 and they are still living independently), my dad gave me a rock, which he said had been very special to him.  It was a very smooth, nice looking rock somewhere between a quarter and half-dollar in size with many colors radiating through it.  This gift occurred as a result of my giving him a rock for Christmas as a result of an advertisement that I had heard earlier about giving rocks as Christmas presents.

 Several weeks before Christmas as I was driving to visit to visit my parents, while listening to the radio in my car, I heard a commercial from some company that was advertising some type of product (a jewelry store, I believe).  The spokesman used, as his pitch, the idea that if you wanted to save money on purchasing Christmas gifts this year, giving rocks was an excellent idea.  Then he went through a litany of reasons why a rock would be a good gift.  I can’t remember all of the reasons, but some seemed to be that you could paint them any color you wanted, they wouldn’t leave unless you tossed them out, they were quiet and never made any messes, or that they didn’t eat much and never interrupted you when you were making your sales pitch.  If this just meets the moment, he then said that his product would be a much better idea because it would be appreciated much more.

 That reminded me of the “pet rock” craze a number of years ago when everyone had to have a pet rock and they would list some of the same justifications for giving such a gift as were in the commercial.  It was kind of like the indivisible pet attached to a collar and leash that people walked around with.

 But before both of these crazes developed, while teaching in Minnesota, I became aware of the fact that the area where the school was located had an abundance of two things: milk cows and rocks.  To be truthful, I wasn’t quite sure which came first or if one was dependant upon the other.  But I do know that when the milk cow industry went belly up, the rocks were still there and they never seemed to leave either.  In fact they just seemed to increase year by year even without the cows.  Each fall after the crops would be harvested, farmers would till the land; and the next spring they would have to go through their fields collecting the new rocks that had surfaced during the winter months before they planted their crops.  It was a family tradition to pick rocks and even some students hired themselves out picking rocks after school and during the weekends.

 One weekend while driving between towns within this area and seeing the rock pickers in many different fields an epiphany occurred to me which I latter shared my students.  Seeing the size and number of rocks being picked up made me wonder, if during the winter months, the rocks beneath the soil had baby rocks and like many other things, grew and matured before surfacing as mature rocks ready to reproduce.  I wondered how the parent rocks got there in the first place. From this question, I decided that during the night the rock fairy must have planted them or dropped them off and they quickly burrowed into the earth before daylight so as not discovered.  Because of the student’s skepticism when I told them about this possibility, I challenged them to come with a better observable theory, which they never really did.

 It seemed to me that because of this challenge, there was a good question to ask on the next quiz about the above observation on my part. A true or false question was developed that ask; do rocks come from other rocks?  Some students answered true while others answered false.  The question was actually set up to count both answers as correct because each student’s answer was dependent upon their interpretation about what “rock” was and whether organic matter was considered rock before it was compressed into a solid form.

 This actually fit into my testing philosophy whenever I built a quiz or test.  I wanted to make sure that all students would be able to get at least (even if they had not reviewed the material or not paid attention in class) one question right on every assessment.   Conversely, one question usually should also be designed to make students use their thinking caps and apply information presented to new information so that they can arrive at a conclusion based upon transferring that information to something, which is new.  Unlike most generated test, I was more interested in finding out what the students didn’t know rather than what they had merely memorized so that I could for different approached to accomplish the desired objective.  This doesn’t mean reintroducing prior information when one or two missed a question; but when most of the students miss question, there is a good probability that the question was either designed wrong or the correct response wasn’t presented correctly.

 And now, back to the rock that my dad gave to me.  I haven’t named it yet, but I did keep it warm by keeping it in my pocket while on the way home.  Thus far, it has been extremely quiet and I’m not sure if it hasn’t adjusted to its new environment or that it still just missed its former owner.  Because of this concern, I will probably bring it along on my next visit to my parents and if it disappears while I’m visiting them, then I will know that it misses them and wants to be returned!

Filed under: education   |  Leave a Comment