Animals as Teachers

You may have seen signs in someone’s home about the things the cat taught them: keep clean, enjoy the little things in life, rest when you’re tired, and be curious about new things.

Truth is, we can learn a lot from all sorts of life, and in this case, an architect learned something important from termites.

Is there some sort of non-human life form that taught you something?

Thinking about animals, insects, etc. that you have studied, how might their advantages help us deal with challenges in our society?

You might also wonder why more buildings haven’t been built using the lessons we learn from termite mounds, which after all, have been around for as long as there have been termites. Why are we only recently* learning the lessons that they can teach us?

There may be dozens of moments each day when someone, something, or some animal offers up a lesson that could lead to something really cool and distinctive in your life. Perhaps the hard part is knowing that the lesson is happening.

* For style points, research whether others have modeled buildings on how termite mounds work. You might discover that they have done this in some cultures. You might discover that a given culture hasn’t, but people in that culture have done something else that could lead to new ways of building where you live.

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See How Termites Inspired a Building That Can Cool Itself by National Geographic on YouTube (3:07) 

The NVIV (Next Vista Inspiring Videos) series of posts are written by Rushton Hurley and designed to provide students and teachers with fascinating discussion prompts. For more information about how to use the variety of materials on our free site, feel free to contact us.