Just Saying, Too.
Monika Hardy’s evocative post and my response:
curiosity is a natural and beautiful phenomena.
when generously facilitated, learning how to learn becomes the most basic, the most simple, and the most vital of all skills.
unfortunately, in public ed, as we have sought knowledge during an age where that suited us, we find ourselves bound by the very system that we ourselves manufactured to give us opportunity.
now that the ability to facilitate natural curiosity in a public school setting via individualization to infinity per passion/curiosity is possible, most of us are unable to tap into it.
it seems we need a manufactured short term detox/rehabilitation for any that have been through formal schooling, to get us back to the state of and believing in our natural curiosity.
nclb = absolutely
achievement gap = misnomer ..
My response:
I think the operative word for me in your post is “bound”. And a fascinating word it is, one that swings back and forth like a bell’s brass clapper. In one sense it means to tie down. It also means to adjoin. Or perhaps you like it to mean to bounce upward? How about the covers of a book? Or feeling obliged toward someone? I like its meaning as a noun that describes the boundaries of a property line–its metes and bounds.
This is going the long way round the barn to say that perhaps we are not bound to but bounding toward some new and better place for learners. To extend the metaphor, in order to bound toward we have to put feet down somewhere. That somewhere is wherever fresh heaven or hell we happen to be working in at that moment. Otto Scharmer’s book Theory U suggests that if we are listening care-fully we can allow ourselves to be drawn toward an emerging future as we leap. I don’t mean for this to get fuzzy around the edges, but passion guides these bounds. We need to know clearly but not too clearly what we want.
Or as Machado writes, we make the road by walking it.
One of the most profound things I have ever read about how to become unbound and how to rebound was written by Myles Horton who said,
“What you must do is go back, get a simple place, move in and you are there. The situation is there. You start with this and let it grow. You know your goal. It will build its own structure and take its own form. You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation.” (Horton, 1997, p. 55)
Horton, M. (1997). The Long Haul: An Autobiography. Teachers College Press.
I conclude that we are not bound. Cut the spider’s web and let your own thread lower you to where you need to be. Be unbound.
tellio :: Aug.18.2010 :: Educational Common Life, Metaphor, coming to terms, life, philosophy :: No Comments »
