Nothing to this system

Marisa O’Neil

Through the front door of Andersen Elementary, past the office,

through the library and down the stairs of the performance pit sits

Joanna Blakely-Lauer’s fourth-grade classroom.

The Newport Beach school has an open floor plan, with each of its

classrooms indoors around the centerpiece library. The flow and use

of space work together to make an ideal venue for a unusual lesson

that is getting a trial run in Blakely-Lauer’s class.

There, the educational standards get revamped -- with deductive

reasoning.

“I’m going to give you a big idea, and you have to come up with

the details to prove it,” Blakely-Lauer told her students during

class last week. “What do we know about systems?”

Nearly everyone’s hand shot up toward the ceiling.

“It’s a group of objects that work together for a complex whole,”

10-year-old Hollace Barden said, twisting her blond hair around her

finger.

“What are some examples?” Blakely-Lauer asked.

“A computer,” Ryan Delgado, 9, offered. “All the microchips and

parts work together.”

“That’s right,” Blakely-Lauer said. “Knowing about systems allows

us to learn more about something than just studying one part. We can

understand things at a deeper level.”

Applying that reasoning to their lessons about Native American

tribes, she added, could help them learn more about the culture.

Fishing for food, for example, is a type of system.

“Our big idea for the day is that systems can be man-made or

natural,” she announced. “Give me a hypothesis off the top of your

head.”

“People make systems with resources, but nature has its own,” Kate

Lamas, 9, proposed.

“Man-made systems people built, and natural systems no one built,”

9-year-old Sydney Raguse added.

To test the hypotheses, Blakely-Lauer split the students into

groups, gave them a poster board and asked them to write or

illustrate natural and man-made systems in the Native American tribes

they had studied.

Each group illustrated the differences its own way, some with

drawings, others with examples written in bright color ink, and

others with their boards divided into sections. After about 10

minutes, Blakely-Lauer called the first group up to make a

presentation in front of the class.

“They grow a lot of crops,” 9-year-old Michael Keasey said. “And

animals and rivers are natural systems, too.”

“Man-made systems are houses, weapons and cooking, because nature

couldn’t have done that,” Alex Beyrooty, 10, added.

Each of the other groups presented its findings, with the same

results. The class had -- systematically -- proven their hypothesis.

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot

education writer Marisa O’Neil visits a campus in the Newport-Mesa

area and writes about her experience.