Determine to study botany, and you will discover entomology plays an important part in botany. Determine then to study entomology and you will discover that insects and the soil of the land are intimately related. Such is the tapestry — the ecology — that is the study of the world: everything is connected.
And so, how can you study one thing, knowing that any deep investigation of the matter will touch on other subjects that are just as deep, require just as much study, and that those will touch on others and so on?
If you lucky and you are a good teacher, one day one of your best students will, in one form or another, ask you this question. Why, they will ask, should they study so hard, if there is always more left unrevealed, if there is simply too much to know, if nothing can be truly understood by itself?
This is a fine moment: your student has realized how deep and connected is their world.
How will you answer?
I’d point them at James Burke’s excellent series Connections and shout, “Weeee!”
[...] the The Guru’s Handbook, Asher Bey writes: Determine to study botany, and you will discover entomology plays an important part in botany. [...]
I think that the value of everything being connected, once one gets beyond the initial overwhelming sense that “the work” will never be done, is that because of those connections whatever is learned then has multiple applications and therefore actually increases the usefulness of the learning.
[...] am inspired by Michael Gilbert’s response to my open question about connection to comment on the teacher’s role in defining the [...]
Janet, this is food for thought. I wonder what some of those multiple applications might be. Perhaps patterns from multiple subjects that function similarly? Students using the same learning styles in different studies? Similar language and vocabularies? What do you see?