Austin Scholar #55: What Mary Poppins Can Teach Us About Education
& How I Became an Academic Person (Because I Wasn't Born This Way)
Hey, y'all!
Mary Poppins is one of my very favorite children's movies.
It also perfectly embodies how we need to educate kids.
The movie's most iconic songs encapsulate the essence of how true learning happens.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How I Became an Academic Person (Because I Wasn't Born This Way)
What Mary Poppins Can Teach Us About Education
Scholar’s Sources: College Essay Writing Workshop
Austin’s Anecdote: How I Became an Academic Person (Because I Wasn't Born This Way)
Academics aren’t something to love in my family.
My sister’s declared she’s “not a math person” and has been turned off from other subjects, and my mom’s more into learning about physical and mental health than she is about history and literature.
My dad also didn’t enjoy the academic courses he took when he was growing up. He preferred learning life skills and exploring the non-traditional subjects like entrepreneurship and technology.
For everyone in my family, academics are just things you have to do. By the time I started elementary school, that mindset had rubbed off on me too..
I mean, sure, it was cool to get a science question correct. But I didn’t wake up in the morning and want to do some math problems or read about history.
Enjoyment and academics were two completely separate things for me. Any history class was a drag. Calculus was a jumble of letters and symbols.
But in the last few years, things started to change. I read an incredible calculus book that changed how I think about math and its relationship to the world. No longer were equations vague concepts that don’t actually mean anything. Instead, calculus and statistics and other math disciplines became crucially interwoven into everyday life. Math was just describing the world in the only universally recognizable way.
And this past year, I started having really engaging conversations with my parents about U.S. history and what its development can teach us about humanity. I began identifying overarching patterns through these conversations, that looked like storylines of books. I started to realize history was just a big story. Then, during my midterm, I got a ton of questions correct because I’d memorized every word to Hamilton.
The more I started to tackle my courses through this perspective of fascination, the more learning started to have a different connotation.
Math became about discovering connections and creating solutions, History became listening to a story. Working through these daunting subjects wasn’t a miserable part of my day anymore.
Learning academic concepts became… fun. I identified the captivating pieces of every subject and developed unique ways to learn and remember them.
Soon, I found myself watching calculus theory TikTok videos and reading history articles in my free time. I transformed my relationship with academics and started to see them as different lenses I can put on to make sense of the world around me. And that made learning absolutely irresistible to me.
Every kid should be able to see learning as something more than just a requirement. Academic subjects don’t have to be boring. I’ve been able to find what makes me love them, and your kid can, too.
What Mary Poppins Can Teach Us About Education
I love Mary Poppins. I’ve watched the movie at least fifteen times and I’ve even acted in a Mary Poppins musical. For those of you who haven’t yet experienced this whimsical story, basically, a magical nanny turns two trouble-making children (Jane and Michael Banks) into kind, well-behaved wonders. (Here’s the Wikipedia summary if you want a more in-depth plot.)
I was having a conversation about learning with David Perell when I realized that Mary Poppins practically perfectly embodies how we need to educate kids.
Mary Poppins breaks the learning process into three stages (and three iconic songs):