It's All Related

My favorite middle school history teacher, Danny Watkins, used to say, "You thought we were off the subject, but we've never been more on the subject in our - what - lives.  Everything relates to history."  Aside from just loving to hear him talk like that, I'm not sure I truly understood what he meant until much later in my life.

Like most middle school students, I did not yet have the ability to see the intertwined relationships of all the subjects I had at school.  Your life exists in 50 minute segments at that point, and it is hard to see past that.  It seemed like math was math and science was science and history was history.  It was probably when I started taking chemistry in high school that I started seeing the relationships between science and math.  When I was in college, taking the required humanities courses, I began to see the connection  between art and literature and history (which I now realize is the reason they require these courses).

It wasn't until I began teaching, however, that I realized how related all the subjects are to each other and to truly understand Mr. Watkins assertion that "everything relates to history."  This week, I took my physics students (in conjunction with the math club and an art class) on a field trip to the art museum.  Why? Because they have an exhibit on MC Escher and one on Leonardo DaVinci.  If not for space restrictions on the numbers, we could have totally included Latin and history classes on this trip.  Art reflects the thinking of the artist, and Escher's schooling (small though it was) was in architecture.  Is it any surprise that his art work often involved impossible structures, building architects could dream of but not build?  DaVinci is often referred to as a Renaissance man, meaning he was good at a lot of things.  While we are not all as gifted as Leonardo, shouldn't we all be Renaissance in our thinking?  Shouldn't we be interested in a lot of things?  If we were, wouldn't we all be able to better view the created world as a whole, instead of the specialized niches we operate in these days?


Why does it matter?  You may be wondering.  Seeing the relationships won't change the price of milk or change my gas mileage.  Why should I care enough to see the world as a whole when doing so does little to affect my daily life?  I think there are at least two good reasons.

First, it applies more to your daily life than you probably realize.  When I am teaching about physics, I may not consciously be thinking about art work of Isaac Newton's time or the fact that the periodic table was invented in Russia around the same time that the civil war was happening in America.  However, it is in my subconscious.  It does inform the depth of my understanding of what I am looking at.  You may not think consciously about whether the Mayans or the Babylonians came up with the concept of zero when looking at your bank statement, but their understanding of the concept IS why you have a bank statement.  A Facebook friend of mine recently posted that he had not diagramed a sentence in his adult life.  Neither have I, but I do know when to properly use who and whom (and I'm pretty sure that my understanding of that came from sentence diagraming even though I HATED doing it).  I know I'm not going to convince you of this, so let me move on to reason number two.

Second, and more importantly, God's work reflects God's nature.  If he has created both beauty and function, we should care about both art and engineering.  If His patience is reflected by the erosion of the Grand Canyon, we should absolutely want to understand that erosion.  If his dependability is reflected through the consistency of mathematical relationships, then we cannot fully understand how to depend on him without caring about those relationships.  Having a deep and full relationship with God should mean caring about the things He has made, whether or not they apply to our career.  When did our career become the measure of importance?  You would never say to your spouse that you don't care what he does during the day, except for the parts that impact what you do during the day.  You would never ignore your child's drawing because it has nothing to do with the price of groceries.  No, you hang it on the very refrigerator that holds those groceries.  Why, then, do we do that to so many aspects of God's work?  We have allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that education is about getting a job and being prepared for that job.  I may have to write a separate post on this some time because it is difficult to convey briefly.  Education is about repairing something that was fractured by the fall.  It's nice that we are able to use some of what we learn in our education for our jobs, but we must let go of the utilitarian philosophy that makes us think that is all we need to learn.  I teach physics, but I would be the world's most horrifyingly dull person if that was all I could talk about.  I also love art and literature and music and television and film and dance and theater and theology and the unit circle.  I can hold a conversation on just about anything because I am interested in everything God has put for us to enjoy.  It is part of being what He created me to be as a WHOLE PERSON, not just as a physics teacher.

Mr. Watkins was right (as he usually was).  It is all related.