Rock Climbing for a Class

First all, make sure you check out our webchat for prospective students where you'll get to ask questions of current students (I'll be there to answer questions along with the other GA's from the admissions office).  First Web Chat is Tuesday October 4 from 7:30 to 9pm.  Please RSVP by clicking here: Web Chat Link.

For my Foundations of Practices of Teaching and Learning class, we have to learn how to do something this semester and blog about it.  The "Learning Blog" that we're going to write will comprise the majority of our grade for the semester.  We picked what we were going to learn during the first week.  I chose that I was going to learn how to rock climb (other people chose learning how to make soap, bake bread, do yoga, run a 5K etc).  Throughout the course of the semester I'll be writing about my experiences learning something new, in the context of the theories I'm learning in class (how's that for practical application).  Being glib about it, I get to say that I'm going rock climbing once a week for a class.

It's actually a really neat idea.  We can talk theoretically all day about how people learn and what the most effective way to learn is, but this is actually putting it to use.  In keeping a weekly blog about it (on Blackboard which is the online site for the course), we get to not only explore the readings, but actually apply them to our own learning.  For example, this week I'll go climbing, take an introductory lesson at a climbing gym, and then write about how my learning process incorporated Piaget or Skinner. 

I went down to Go Vertical, a climbing gym at Delaware Ave and Spring Garden (between Old City and the Stadium Complex).  The gym was hopping.  People were super friendly and seemed like they were having a blast.  Only one other person signed up for this class (though her friend who had convinced her to take it after she herself had taken the class earlier in the week tagged along).  During my first session I got worked by the instructor, Lex.  He began by teaching us how to rope in, explained the climbing lingo (how to interpret the scale climbers use to evaluate difficulty), and then we got to climbing.  For our first climb, he said, just pretend it's a ladder, and get at it.  So I got to climb, explore what worked best to get me up that first wall.  Throughout the course of the evening, as we climbed, he gave pointers on how to improve our form, but mostly let us do our own thing, trying to explore what worked for us.  I'll probably write in my learning blog about how it applies to the Piagetian notion of creating schema based on our own experiences, but I need to do a little bit of reflecting before I tackle that one.  Needless to say, its an assignment that I'm pretty stoked about.