I returned from an avalanche course last weekend and Sarah welcomed me home by exclaiming, “You are going to be so jealous!” She and Hannah had gone ice skating that day and found a perfect learning environment.
What makes the perfect learning environment? It’s all about consequence. This risk assessment matrix is a helpful way to look at it:
This matrix is an effort to evaluate the likelihood of an event and its consequences. The lower left corner (green) fits events that are not likely and not a big deal, like a flat tire on a bike when commuting to work. This is a comfort zone, and we don’t learn much here.
The sweet spot for learning is the upper left corner:
Events in the upper left are highly likely, but not a big deal. Most of my work as an outside educator is identifying or creating these sites: where can we fall out of our boats, intentionally trigger weak layers in the snow, or learn about the different ways that ice cracks, with as much margin of safety as possible?
The learning zone is very different from the scary zone in the lower right corner, where events are not likely, but have high consequences. This corner terrifies me. Deep persistent slab avalanche problems fit this category:
Back to Sarah’s thin-ice learning experience. Here’s Hannah skating on about 3/4″ inch of ice. Notice that she is causing both radial and circumferential cracks to form. Circumferential cracks are an indicator that you could plunge through at any second.
But, in this case, breaking through isn’t a big deal! Under the thin ice is a layer of water then 6+ inches of ice—more than enough to support the weight of skaters.
The consequences are wet boots.
Sarah and Hannah got to learn a lot about thin ice without actually exposing themselves to thin ice hazards. I am jealous! They stumbled upon (or, rather, glided to) a learning sweet spot.
