The latest US News has a revealing article on successfully reformed schools, but I was especially struck by a couple paragraphs about differing approaches at schools for educating low-income children. Low-income children often bring two limitations to school: small vocabularies and limited background knowledge.
For example, at one school in the Louisiana Bayous, George Hall, teachers know that their students haven't had the opportunity to travel. They live ten minutes from the bayou, but they've never seen a boat. So they get taken on a boat trip. In fact, George Hall students go on an average of one field trip a month, each one carefully selected to help students learn a great deal about the world around them. Each trip comes accompanied by writing, videotaping, and blogging assingnments. Not only do students get to hold a snake, for example, but they have multiple opportunities to use snake-related words such as slithery, slippery, and scales.
Exposure to different experiences, of course, is a lot more than just the experience. It's learning about the experience, being able to analogize from that experience, and being able to put the learning from that experience into practice in other settings.
Exposure learning shows itself to be a highly useful process for everyone. Some years ago, the chairman of the speech-communication department at the University of Minnesota asked if I'd be willing to teach a course in basic communication skills at a maximum security prison in one of the distant suburbs. At the time, I'd just left a university position, and though I was building my business, I had the time to teach one course. Much to my suprise I found that one of the course members had spent a year in the home of one of my professors from undergrad college. The state of Kentucky often furloughed prisoners to attend school if there was an available family willing to take them in. I knew immediately that he was giving me no snow job for he described the profs in detail as well as buildings, events and other teachers at my college. Then he described living with my prof and his wife. He said that there was time devoted each day to studies with tutoring from one of them, a movie nite, a theater night (staged productions), a sports night, and a restaurant nite. He loved the exposure and performed very well in college
So why, I asked him are you in prison now? He leaned back and told me that my prof and his wife had had a different prisoner every year for more than twenty years, all of whom, except him, had gone on to graduate from college and hold down a job. The exposure and experience they had provided these criminals had been of much value. And, he was, he related, the only "jerk" in the bunch. He was, he continued, a compulsive thief and deserved to be in prison. I commented that I thought a 90% success rate was pretty damn good. He held up his hands in frustration and agreed. In spite of my student's record, exposure and learning can often work magic.
At the other end of the age spectrum, when my first grandchild was exactly 28 months old, he initiated me into the truck business. His parents were living in a Philadelphia suburb off the Mainline, about a block from a grammar school that was completing a major renovation. Trucks were pretty constant up and down the street, and as with a lot of little boys, he was enamored of them. Since we lived in Minnesota, I hadn't kept up with his verbal growth. But he and I went for a walk to see the school and the trucks. Obviously, I was unaware that I had a precocious monster on my hands, but that was immediately clear when I pointed out a "biggggg dump truck" to him.
With the disgust only a kid that age can demonstrate, he turned and said, "Actually. . . (I knew right then I was in for trouble). "Actually, it's an ar-tic-u-la-ted dumptruck."
I had never heard of such an animal so he explained in great detail, with little fingers pointing, and a serious face transfixed, telling me how the dirt and gravel could come out of the middle of the truck, instead of just the back, and that they could carry a bigger load than other dumptrucks. Just a few years later, he was learning the math to figure out how many cubic yards of gravel different trucks can carry.
It's all about exposure.
The same is true in the workworld. Some of the best learning can come from exposure to different experiences, what I call stretch experience. And still other learning can come from exposure to better company processes. I often urge Gen-Yers to get into the best firm possible, even if for just a few years. You'll always learn more from the processes of the better run companies. Working with great processes is more important than working with highly talented people. After that exposure, you can go do your own thing outside the corporate cubicle.