OPPORTUNITY

Suppose you had the opportunity to rethink, or reconsider, what you do. And that you had the opportunity, finally, to make that real?

Suppose you had been asking for this kind of opportunity for years, but the structure you found yourself in would not allow such change. But suddenly, unfolding around you, in whatever form, whether a chaotic dissembling, or a forceful dynamic, you found the opportunity facing you.

The metamorphosis from a larvae to a butterfly is turbulent in its beauty, disruptive in its morphology but genius in its process. The butterfly does not regret its transcendence.

There have always been those in education who mourn the "loss" of what change brings. That is undeniable. The Greeks mourned the loss of memory with the advent of writing. We phylogenetically mourn the loss of visual language because we live in a verbal/graphic culture. We mourned the loss of teaching Greek and Latin. We mourn the loss of the classics, the canon, of Western history, of familiar paradigms. We should mourn these. There are values rooted in these shifts, and we all know what this loss means. The shift from pre-digital to digital culture seems to threaten the very act of reading, what is read, what is valued, that the scrim of the screen replaces the permanence of the printed page.

But to be human is to experience these shifts, to work through these transitions.

To educate, and to be an educator, is to work with students as they face these transitions just as our educators faced them when they taught us.

We cannot hold on simply to hold on, for that is a rear-guard struggle, and rear-guard struggles never win. And the pace of change in our lifetime is accelerating so quickly that we cannot risk staying in one place too long.

None of this is easy. But is one of the most human struggles, facing conflict and change. We become more human, I think, as we openly address these conflicts, as we address these changes. We become more human when we ask ourselves, as educators, is the best we can do? Is this the most exciting curriculum we can construct? Is this the most challenging curriculum I can build? Am I doing right by myself, my colleagues, my students, and the community?

Who am I educating, and what am I educating them for?