I have been hearing from so many educators (Wesley Fryer, Steve Dembo, Paul Allison, David Warlick, and others) that all of the learning comes from the conversations, not the sessions. They are absolutely right. In the hallways we were talking about pedagogy and authentic learning with people who have a vision for education, but in the presentation rooms, we only discussed a well formatted agenda for specific (always proprietary) tools.

After going through all of the motions of this day, I have decided that gadget wonks are of no value to me. Although I see that they are disconnected from the classroom, that isn’t what bothers me. Many people who aren’t in the classroom have great ideas for the future of education. What bothers me is that they have can’t see the entire vision. They can’t see the affect of reflective practice, of piecing together the scattered collaborators into a movement.

The entire vision for School 2.0 is of desperate importance. It is the only way that the learning environment will change. Gadgets do not create change, people create change.

If I really believe that, I need to stop asking myself how I can get more gadgets into the classroom. What I really need to start asking is how I can get more people into the classroom, through collaboration.

I want to cram as many people into my classroom as possible. I want parents, students (both mine and others’), teachers, community members, and anyone else who has something of value to feel as though they are a part of my learning environment. They should not feel like a foreigner in my learning environment. But, how do we do this? How do we start to bring in all of the rich voices from the outside world without the dependence upon gadgets and proprietary methods? How do we stop teaching for tools themselves and start teaching for learning?

It may sound like I am making a semantic distinction, but I feel, especially after spending an entire day at an extended sales pitch, that our students will never transfer learning if they believe that they can only do it on one tool, or in one classroom. We need them to know that learning happens everywhere with every person they know in a key role. The only way that they will learn is if the people they are connected to learn with them.

Last night, though, every student from Wallingford was removed from the spaces that they formerly had called home. The following were the reasons given for this total reversal of technology integration and collaboration:

A parent has complained about wiki and even contacted the State General Attoney to see if it violates anything. Her grievances about the wiki were the following1-there were three personal pictures — all on the map of the home page 2-some kids used their real names on pages or as a username 3-in my post on icon I identified that where I live and that I teach at a “blue collar school” 4-I had pictures of the school and the rooms which could provide a blueprint for a killer 5-some kids put personal descriptors “I am five feet tall with brown hair named Sam” 6-on my “lesson plan blog’ One thing i wrote down last Thursday was something like “Myspace words of Wisdom” which she interpreted as me telling the kids about how they should join. I actually had a heart to heart talk with the kids about what they were including and the problem with the public sites. We just had two students in CT have full scholarships revoked after the University saw their MySpaces. The other part of this is that the school system looks down upon “outside” websites run by teachers. So because the attorney general is now possibly involved, that implies risk to a minor, and that’s frankly not something I am going to play around with.

The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is, “Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public nature of the internet?

Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?

Creating an educational movement based upon technology integration, student-directed authentic learning, and anywhere/anytime collaboration. However, this show is not merely for educators, rather it is an easily accessible look at what 21st century classroom are capable of. The show will be grounded in practice rather than theory, so as to convince all of the students, parents, teachers, and bystanders who may still be clinging to the ways in which they have been taught. The show will have an interview-based format, in which I will be probing the experts on what can be done to create change. I will be searching for ways to cultivate School 2.0 in the minds of all who are interested in seeing our children meet their true potential as thinkers, leaders, and doers.

Sounds pretty exciting, right? Well, here is the rub. I have no idea what to call the thing. All of these really terrible names are jumping around in my head asking me to use them for a project that may go on for years. I can’t be tied down like that. I need something clever, something with hope and promise. Not something like the ones I have already written down:

1. The EdTech Vision Podcast.
2. The EdTech Community Podcast.
3. The Open Education Podcast.
4. The TEACH Podcast (Technology in Education through Authentic Collaboration and Heuristic learning)
5. Technology in Authentic Education Podcast
6. The Next Generation of Education Podcast
7. The Education Collaboration through Technology Integration Podcast
8. The Education 2.0 Podcast (This one was Cameron’s)
9. The Educational Technology Collaborative Podcast

None of these will do, mostly because I don’t think that any of them really encompass what we, as a community of teachers and learners, are trying to accomplish in transforming education. So, I put it to you, humble readers. What should a podcast be called that is trying to spearhead an entire movement into a weekly episode. If I am going to envision so much collaboration in the classroom, it had better start with me.

I often think about this digital trail that I am leaving behind. It is amazing to me to know that many of the ideas I am having right now will affect others years from now. I still receive e-mail about a band webpage I put up when I was 16. It is scary how much the internet has a memory. It is cataloging every keystroke I publish. And this is beautiful. The internet knows that my name is associated with my ideas. This makes me truly happy.

So, in an effort to make concrete something that is so disparate, here are the key elements of my web presence (these will have active links in the near future):

Podcasting:

1. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts
2. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts Digg Page
3. Weekly Authentic Gcast
4. Yongesonne Gcast
5. 2005-2006 Discovery Podcasts

Blogs:

1. Discourse about Discourse
2. Daily Lesson Plans
3. Isabelle’s Dandelife

Wikis:

1. Academy of Discovery
2. Discovery -Isms
3. Discovery Utopias
4. DC Edusphere
5. Yongesonne’s Educational Technology Resources
6. LA Cresthill Collaboration
7. Lesson Planning Wiki

Social Bookmarking:

1. WeeklyAuthentic del.icio.us
2. bhwilkoff del.icio.us

Social Networking:

1. Myspace
2. Standpoint
3. Stop CyberBullying
4. Facebook

E-mail:

1. Gmail
2. Firstclass

Public Accounts at services I regularly use:

1. Teacher Bloglines
2. Student Bloglines
3. Discourse about Discourse Feedburner
4. Flickr Account
5. Google Calendar
6. Google Documents
7. Google Reader
8. Conversate
9. Jotform
10. Wufoo
11. Technorati

Number of Google hits for “Ben Wilkoff” – 891.

I hope that none of this comes off sounding narcissistic. This exercise merely meant to show the beginnings of my digital legacy. It is also meant as a challenge for you to estimate your web presence and to start to think about how your digital trail of breadcrumbs will help others down the road.

Without too much further exposition, the fallacy is as follows:

Professionals create more valuable content than amateurs.

By calling this statement a “myth” I am not aiming to devalue the work of people who have a lifetime of experience or that I would like to declare that students officially know more than their teachers. Instead, I would like to analyze the way that we define professionals and amateurs, and the kind of respect these kinds of definitions can and should provide.

In our stereotypical understanding these two words, we seem to glorify the professional and vilify the amateur:

We value all that the professional can do for us. He gets the job done. Although you pay a premium for his services, it are always worth it. He has the credentials that tell us he can do what he advertises, and he packages everything so nicely, presenting us with just the right amount of content as to not over or underwhelm. We feel safe with the professional in charge.

Now, the amateur on the other hand, works on his own schedule, according to his own interests. He gives us more information than we need, and more specific details than we could possible comprehend. His excitement is annoying when you consider that he doesn’t have the experience to back up his work. Sure, he is willing to collaborate with you, but you don’t have time for it anyway.  The amateur makes connections to others’ work by remixing it, sometimes by breaking intellectual property laws. The amateur is dangerous.

I would like to now enumerate the actual traits of each worker/learner. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it gets the point across.

A professional is:

• Someone who has experience with marketable skills in a given discipline.
• Someone who has achieved accredited education based upon standardized performance measures.
• Someone who requires compensation and/or credit for products and ideas.
• Someone who’s work must remain consistent and thematic.

An amateur is:

• Someone who has specific skills that allow them to create a specific product.
• Someone who has achieved personalized education based upon self-assessed interest and achievement.
• Someone who does not require compensation and/or credit for work.
• Someone who’s work can be sporadic and follow inspiration in any field.

I may be oversimplifying things a bit in making these statements, but I believe that this dichotomy is the way we encounter the entire field of education. Each student we encounter is an amateur, and we see them through the stereotype. We should, instead, give them the respect that that word really commands.

My examples of amateur wisdom do not come from wikipedia or from digg. They come from my classroom. I would like to show you what my amateur students are capable of.

• The Great Remix Debate
• Iwthswtl Avenue for the Rich
• Thinking about Thought Cont.
• The Putsal Super League
  

Professionals would never have created these. No one would have paid money for them or said that they are achievements equivalent to 1400 on the SAT, but they still have great value. Their value is in their their amateur status. Their value is in their passion and authenticity. Their value is in the fact that each one of the students involved in these projects are learning for themselves. To me, that is amazing.

Professionals will always be among us, and I think that they deserve credit for their work. But, real learning happens in the realm of the amateur. Real challenge and job satisfaction happens there to. The real challenge of School 2.0 is incorporating more amateur moments, encouraging all students to become true amateurs.

This year I chose to think about next year that seems to be approaching so rapidly as to be nearing terminal velocity. All last week, I said what I have always said about next years, “I am determined to get it right next year.” But this year the “it” is different. This year I am not referring to classroom management. This year the “it” is not referring to teaching a book or unit the right way. The “it” this year is that I am going to get the next generation of my classroom right. I am going to make sure that I have all of the research and ideas in place so that I know and everyone else knows what the Discovery Team will look like when it comes through this fundamental change.

So what will change next year? Well, it is my hope that teaching will become a more collaborative process and learning will become more student-directed. This may sound far-fetched and somewhat hollow, but I have outlined everything, down to the assessments (much better than CSAP if you ask me) in a wiki. The fact that it is a wiki means that it can change. This vision is malleable by anyone who is interested in taking a stab at making thing better for teachers and students.

The Academy of Discovery is more than just a vision, though. It is a gauntlet that is being thrown down. It is a statement that says education will not be effective without collaboration, context, conversation, change, connection, and continuous support. This ultimatum, however, is more for students than teachers. It means that once we provide you with all of the infinite resources, creativity, potential of a connected classroom, it is your responsibility to be amazing. It is your responsibility to direct your engagement. It is your responsibility to learn.

Digital Writing is:

•    Dynamic.
•    Multi-dimensional.
•    Infinite.
•    Pluralistic.

With these things in mind, all writing should be:
•    Infinitely editable
•    Inherently clickable
•    Continually discussed
•    Focused on revisions and the history of revisions.

Dave Cormier turned me on to the idea that we are still writing for the technology of paper, even if we have moved beyond it in terms of its capabilities. I found intriguing and more than a little frustrating to think that we are still formatting our ideas to be read in a linear and static text form. We have put so much investment as a society in the technology of paper that very few people are ready or able to move past it. Yet, in order to fulfill the potential of a fully connected society, we must start to think in new ways, read in new ways, and especially write in new ways.

First, the idea of ownership must be changed. All writing should have the ability to be edited at any time. Just by clicking on the letters, you should be able to add your own piece of understanding. Anyone should be able to see the original iteration, but they should also be able to see any additions, subtractions, contextualizations, or expansions. This is the only way to have true collaboration. If we stop setting up boundaries for ideas—yours vs. mine—we will all become better writers and visionaries.

All words should blue and underlined; they must be clickable. There is no reason for a story, a poem, an essay, a blog entry, a novel, a biography or even a letter to lack context. Each word should take us to someplace new. Each word should let us explore the web of thought that caused it. Now, if one person were trying to accomplish this, it would never happen for want of a real life. Yet, if each user can add his or her own contextual links, the writing context would grow, the webs of knowledge would spin themselves, and reading and writing would change forever.

If there is anything that blogs have taught us it is that writing should not exist in a vacuum. Ideas that are not read and discussed are of no value. So, logically, we should share all of our writing, discussing each aspect of our discourse and getting instant feedback on our vital work. Comments focus us upon revision, but they shouldn’t be at the bottom of the page. They should be attached to the words, never separated from the context of the ideas. Paper doesn’t allow us to hyperlink our comments, connecting them to the words that made us think of the comments in the first place, but digital writing can allow this if we can move beyond our vision of the internet as Digital Paper.

Digital Paper does not allow us to push writing to what it can become. It limits us to think of writing as a singular and static process. Things like Google Documents are great resources, but they lack the pervasive nature that digital writing needs to have. The entire Internet should be editable, discussable, and clickable. Only then will we be able to shrug off our dependence upon paper as a substance and a metaphor.

Because Google Video has already been banned, I must first take a look at the reasons (or potential reasons) why it was banned and address each issue individually.

• Google Video has “R-Rated content” defined by 8e6 technologies (our filtering software) as “Services pertaining to anything that involves 18 and over material such as lingerie and swimsuits, revealing pictures. Sites that are adult in nature without being explicitly pornographic.”
  • Although I cannot refute the fact that there are a few Google videos that have these elements, I take exception that this filtering is a one size fits all solution for a question of content that many if not most students see every commercial break in prime-time. This solution means that a first grader needs the same protections as a 12th grader.
  • This also leads us to believe that there is no way to filter out certain content, rather than an entire resource. The mere fact that 8e6 can filter out the video portion of the Google domain leads me to believe that this is possible.
  • This solution asks us to accept that teachers are inept at verifying that students are working with valuable video resources, and that students are merely hungry for the smuttiest pictures they can find, which on Google video are pretty sparse.
• Video resources, like Google Video, provide only augmentations for the curriculum and are not an integral part of the learning experience.
  • All of the research currently being done on learning styles comes back with the same conclusion: our students are growing more and more visually engaged. Although Google Video is not the only visual way of presenting materials, it may be the most dynamic. Google Video clusters content by user defined “tags” or categories. These tags provide students and teachers with multiple chances at learning the same thing. Not every student is going to learn in the same way, and many students need the contextual elements (background knowledge) that a collective history on film can provide.
  • Taking away Google Video and other services like it is not like taking away a student’s No. 2 pencil, but rather their colored pencils. Students can still write out their responses, but they cannot illustrate their words, conceptualizing them into proof of actual knowledge. Google Video is not just about consuming video content; it is about creating content. My students respond to videos on a regular basis, critiquing them or expanding their boundaries. They have made video content an integral part of their writing and blogging life. In fact, many of them do not see any boundaries between the act of inserting a picture, a video, or text into their writing. My students are living in a culture of remixed information. When they see something that should be questioned or drawn attention to, they need to be able to do it, at school. By making sure that they can only talk about this content at home, we are insuring irrelevancy in the lives of our students.
• Not enough teachers and students are taking advantage of Google Video on a regular basis for this decision to affect many people.
  • True, Google Video has not reached a tipping point in our schools. Most teachers are not using it as a daily or even weekly classroom resource. This logic, however, is backward. The fact that most teachers are not using this resource does not mean that it should be taken away, it means that Google Video should be promoted and talked about, touted as an ingenious way to create engaged learners. We should be leading the charge to change people’s perceptions about what constitutes learning. We should not wait for the outside pressures of popular culture, and the glacial speed of institutional change. We should educate our students on the potential that video sharing provides for teaching, so that they may better make their own decisions about what content to consume.

Along with all of the reasons above, I think that there are still more that need to be brought up so that our school district can see the value of Google Video and other web services like it.

• Google Video is free, and unlike any paid service, provides up to the minute coverage.
  • I do not believe that you get what you pay for. I believe you get what you share for and what you build for yourself. Because Google Video is built by its users and all of the video files are shared with entire world, the resource can remain free yet be essential. The fact that Google Video gets most of its content through non-traditional means (read non-institutional) it means that much of the time it contains content that can provide for a more varied viewpoint, a more in-depth look, or a more timely expose. For example, if you search for information on the London Bombings, the videos that pop up are not only excerpts from cable news channels but also first-hand accounts from people who were there with camcorders and cameraphones. This kind of citizen journalism is exactly what we are trying to teach our students to do. What better way of showing them its potential than by letting them use it in the classroom.
• Google Video asks students to become content evaluators and validators.
  • Along with my previous example of the London Bombings, the search results also turn up a few “documentaries” on conspiracy theories for the government’s involvement in the bombings. These films are far from the mainstream, but they present a perfect opportunity to teach our students the value of content evaluation. Our modern students are presented with many conflicting reports of events, ideas, and relative values on a daily basis. It is our job as educators to show students how to judge the validity of each claim they hear. They should be responsible for researching the credibility of each story, rather than just accepting it because it is on the internet, or in a textbook.
• Google Video is not about the content; it is about the potential.
  • The real value of Google Video is not the content that is already there. As I have said previously, it has not reached a tipping point for education yet. Google Video is valuable, instead, for its method of content distribution, its potential to change the way that we share information. If our students have the ability to create and upload their own investigations, if they have the ability to critique and evaluate the content of others, and if they have to potential to hover around certain topics of interest and forge organic learning communities, then there is no end to power that Google Video can give them.

To be sure, Google Video is not the only resource out there that our students would benefit from use at school, but I believe that getting it un-banned is a first step in creating the conversation about un-banning 21st century learning. So, I challenge everyone who feels the same way as I do about Google Video and other resources like it, to throw down their own reasons and examples for why Google Video is so valuable to the classroom. I would like to compile them all together and send them to 8e6 technologies and our District technology administrators to see if we can find a solution to this rather misunderstood problem. Link to this post, comment on it, or build upon it. I would hate to think that the power of all of our voices would go unheard when it is put in such inherently understandable terms.

Sure, I had a pretty tough time in middle school, but everything worked out in high school, if in an overly eccentric way. I always identified with the loners and nerds, but I stopped thinking that those were bad things long ago. Why then do I seem to obsess over the minutiae of teendom. Why do I care if a boy picks up a cigarrete out of boredom or explores his city for the first time? Why am I so concerned with the first time around, when I am at least on my second? Well, in an attempt to try and figure this part of my personal curriculum out, I will be analyzing these books that have left such an impact on my reading life.

For a while now, I have been compiling a list of all of these particular influential books, and here is what I have come up with:

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
2. The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green
3. Looking for Alaska
4. Catcher in the Rye
5. Old School
6. King Dork

I would like to analyze my affinity for each one of these books individually in the hopes of find out why they force me to keep looking that this part of my life with a critical eye. I think that I am both up for this challenge and up for doing something, anything to work through this obsession.

Resources are scarce. People are scrounging around, negotiating uneasy solutions, forgoing all tact. The truth is: people are desperate. They want what other people have.

The computers. It always comes down to the computers.

“When can I schedule my class in the lab? What times exactly do you need the laptops? Can I just use a few of the computers in the library for a research project?”

These are the questions I hear all of the time from the hungry hoards, myself included. You see, there is significant disconnect between what the people need, and what is available. This situation is creating a power differential, a hierarchy of computing power. How can we possibly survive in such dire straits as these? With teacher pitting themselves against teacher, signing up for more than they need just so they are guaranteed some.

“You want a projector? Well, I’m afraid you are going to have to do a little dance for me to get it? Mhuahahaha…”

 Who sees this tragedy of unrealized potential? Who notices the loss of interactivity? Who understands the lack of new knowledge being created in the minds of young ones? All for want of a few laptop carts.

We can end this horrific state. We can come together and guarantee a laptop for every child, but only if we recognize the problem. Only if we take the time to care.

Please go to the following links and see what you can do for 1:1 learning. It is the only chance we have to end this unfortunate situation.

• Wes Fryer’s 1:1 Presentation. 
• Talking points for 1:1
  
• Anytime Anywhere Learning

Yesterday I began my podcast by asking myself about the current Graduation Requirements. Are all of these things really essential if many of you will never need to know how to explicate a poem or find the derivative of cosine. We are building students that are all alike. How will you ever stand out in high school, college, or life if we are merely creating different sized versions of the same student. So, I started thinking about what the real graduation requirements should be. I came up with these skills as essential, the ones that all other content can be filtered through:

1. Collaboration, and building upon other’s ideas
2. Writing for specific purposes
3. Creating and pacing your own learning
4. Thinking critically and coming to evidence-based conclusions

But what kind of classes do you take in order to get these skills?

Well, I am proposing that the first class that would get at these new Graduation Requirements would be a class in Collaborative Writing. This class would consist of personally selected projects that involved research, writing, revision, and a huge dose of communication. All students would set up two ways of writing/publishing their work: a wiki and a collaborative document editor. The wiki would be used mainly for research and idea generation. The students, working in teams, would start pulling resources together and linking and writing about them on their wikis. They would also be doing the scholarly writing on their collaborative document editor (like Google Documents). In order to generate more ideas, they would hold weekly podcasts/interviews that measured how they were doing on their projects. They would post these so that all students in the class could see just what others were doing in order to accomplish their writing goals. We would also set up a space and time for students to interview experts on their topics using a blog, a skypecast, or a simple e-mail. Throughout the class, the students would constantly be revising their definition of collaboration in the 21st century, aiming for a class definition that gets at all of the skills they think will be useful later on in life.

Obviously, this particular class needs some fleshing out, but I think that it would be one worth taking and worth teaching. I believe that more writing and thinking would get done in a class like this than in any two composition classes. And I think that is really the point.

When we started blogging at the beginning of this year, I knew that each one of you would develop an online identity, a persona that would be the budding writer, making comments and creating new work. Yet, I had no idea that we would also be forging a collective identity, or more appropriately, a collaborative identity. We now have the power to show the world just what we can be as writers. We can show off the best of collective self. With just a few tags, we can change the way that people see us and access our pulled-together thoughts. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I think our del.icio.us account is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is us.

The future of reading is interactive. It is non-linear. It is user-directed and open-ended. It is visual and collaborative. It is a new skill to be mastered.

Books are linear. You have to start at the beginning and end at the end. The author has already chosen how the story will go. There is a progression that must be followed. Yet, you have no part in creating this progression. All you can do is go along for the ride. Imagining all of the events and people in the story is about as interactive of an experience as you can hope for.

The future I see for literature is one in which all stories are 3-dimensional. What I mean by this is that you can put them together in an infinite number of ways. You can add to them and explore them by navigating a virtual space. It will be like you see the entire story at once, rather than looking at just one moment in time. All stories will somehow be connected to a visual counterpart, taking away some avenues for imagination but creating many more. You will have to be able to analyze both written and visual forms of text, and you will have to fill in the holes of any plot with events of your own.

N ow, I don’t believe that traditional stories and books will ever be extinct. We naturally have beginnings, middles, and endings. But, I believe that there will come a day when this new genre of Creative Reading comes to the forefront of our literacy practice. I believe that someday soon we will have the ability to walk through a story the same way that we walk through a mall. And to show you that this is possible, here is my rather crude example. (You will need Google Sketch-up to read it.)

What I am proposing instead, is that you teach what you want to know to yourselves. It may sound like I making you do my job, but really I am asking you to really do yours. You learn much better when you care about what you are learning. Although I have a set curriculum of what will happen in class everyday, I am proposing that you create a personal curriculum made up of one thing per quarter that can actually be accomplished. We will work on them some in class, but the majority of your learning doesn’t happen in a classroom, so why should these walls confine you, especially with the things you think are truly important. Please know that I will give you whatever resources you need in order to teach yourself, but it it is your learning and you are going to choose it.

Whenever you feel that you have learned what you wanted to throughout the semester and whenever you have gotten just what you wanted out of your search, making yourself into the ultimate expert on the topic, you will present me with a written, visual, or auditory product which shows your learning. I will give you a grade for each of the things that you choose to learn, and since it is your choice, I don’t know why you would get anything other than an A. All of Language Arts is open to you; anything that has at least some reading or some writing involved with it will do. We will be developing our list of three possibilities starting today. Do not choose too quickly; these are the things that you are going to be engaged with for quite some time.
Personal Curriculum Requirements:

1. Must have at least 1 thing per quearter you really want to learn about or how to do.
2. Must be related to Language Arts in some way (if only by the fact that you are reading something or writing something).
3. Must be able to demonstrate mastery of the concept, idea, action, theme, etc.
4. Must be approved by Mr. Wilkoff.

My personal curriculum for the second half of the year:

1. I want to find 3 great books about sensitive boys coming of age. I want to read them and enjoy them and not try to think about how I will use them in class. I want to go on a personal exploration with these books because I feel like I still need to sort a few things out with my coming-of-age faze. I want to start writing a coming-of-age novel/short story of my own.
2. I want to research just how blogging affects students ability to write. I want to find hard data to support the fact that I believe students write better when they blog.
3. I want to get to know my students so well as writers and readers that I would be able to pick them out from a line-up of writing pieces and book choices.

When I started middle school, my friend Charlie started me on a heavy diet of punk rock and ska. Now, this is not to say that this music had more depth to it, but I believe that it started my process of listening for more than just vocal melody. I started listening to the purpose of the music. The music that I was being introduced to had political aims. Many of the punk songs were railing against the way that teenagers were being treated. This was so relevant to my budding teenage angst.

In high school I began exploring music for myself. I was not satisfied to listen to what other people were listening to. I wanted my own bands, my own ideas. It pained me to see so many of my classmates clamoring for one more pop song to climb up the charts. I wanted raw guitars. I wanted disconnected feelings. I wanted reality.

There is nothing so unreal as a pop song. The world should not be able to fit into one simple rhythm, one simple sentimental chorus, one emotion. Life isn’t like that. It is complex and important. Boiling it down into a four minute catchy masterpiece is preposterous.

Journey, although not the only band that capitalizes on the one emotion, simplicity over everything sentiment, that the masses seem to crave, they are the band that seems to embody it and use it to persuade unthinking youngsters to like their music and pop music in general. The following is an analysis of their most enduring song:

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere

The way that this song opens is incredibly vague. Where is the specificity? Are we supposed to believe that small towns are better than big cities? Is she trying to get away from the lonliness of being away from a small town? The thing she is trying to get away from seems to be lonliness, yet she is going anywhere, alone.

Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin anywhere

Now it seems as though, both big cities and small towns are no good. If this loneliness is everywhere, what is the emotion can we possibly feel other than it.

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

The idea here seems to be that the only solution is to have singular moments of drunken happiness while someone sings their troubles away. Hooking up with someone based upon only trying to get away from your problem is the wrong message to send. It is not something to savor in an anthem. It is something to be written about in a trashy novel or talked about with disdain among friends.

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night

So now we are looking to prostitution. I don’t have any problem bringing the problems of the world into music, however, to do it is such a superficial way is terrifyingly inept. Find emotion? What emotion? How can you create any connection to the audience other than with melody when you have such trite lyrics.

Working hard to get my fill,
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

Is there anything more cheesy than saying that everyone wants something and we are all looking for it. Some winning and some losing is not something that needs to be stated. It is an obvious part of life. It is a line that was picked to rhyme. Nothing in music is more despicable than that.

Don’t stop believin
Hold on to the feelin
Streetlight people

Finally, my questions at the end of this torturous song can only be: what should I not stop believing, and why should I hold on to the feeling if the feeling is one with a prostitute or hook-up?

Now, it may not be fair to disect a song and put my own slant on it, but I believe that all the music that I listen to should matter to me. I believe that even if something is catchy, it must relate to me. Nothing about this song, other than the incredible melody and vocal quality, relates to my life, or provides me with edifying thought. I will not attempt to criticize the music of this song because, after all, I am tainted by all of my experiences with discordant music, just like some are tainted by much of the pop music that they have been exposed to.

The end to this debate can only come with another song analysis. Whatever some other students might believe, I do not think that all of the music I listen to is for everyone. I do, however, believe that everyone should be able to appreciate the lyrics of my emblematic band: Death Cab for Cutie.

There’s a saltwater film on the jar of your ashes; I threw them to the sea,
but a gust blew them backwards and the sting in my eyes
that you then inflicted was par for the course just as when you were living.
It’s no stretch to say you were not quite a father
but the donor of seeds to a poor, single mother that would raise us alone.
We never saw the money that went down your throat
through the hole in your belly.

Thirteen years old in the suburbs of Denver,
standing in line for Thanksgiving dinner at the Catholic church.
The servers wore crosses to shield from the sufferance plaguing the others.
Styrofoam plates, cafeteria tables,
charity reeks of cheap wine and pity and I’m thinking of you,
I do every year when we count all our blessings
and wonder what we’re doing here.

You’re a disgrace to the concept of family.
The priest won’t divulge that fact in his homily
and I’ll stand up and scream if the mourning remain quiet,
you can deck out a lie in a suit.
But I won’t buy it.
I won’t join the procession that’s speaking their piece,
using five dollar words while praising his integrity.
Just ’cause he’s gone, it doesn’t change that fact:
he was bastard in life, thus a bastard in death.

These are simple lyrics, yet they convey an image. They aren’t talking about the specifics of life, not skimming the surface in an attempt to reach the masses. Even though my father was not like this, I can relate to the power of this message. It is about something. It is powerful, potent, relevant, and beautiful. Journey may be catchy, but they can’t hold a candle to modern indie-rock music.

Identity is art. It is craft. It is make-believe. There is truly no such thing as a personal identity, only one that we have constructed to look like someone we would want to be. In reality, we are all swirling around within our own skin, looking for something to hold on to long enough to call our own. Comfort is a luxury we do not have when it comes to identity. We must exist in a constant flux as to who we are and what we want. Race, sexual orientation, personality: these are the things that complicate this process. Discomfort in our own skin is the constant state of our lives because of pressures from each other, ourselves, and our societal environment.

Relationships affect action. The connection made with another person requires a deliberate change in identity. You must shift into your mode of friendship with this person, remembering all of the things that you have done with this person, all of the things that this person doesn’t like, all of the things that will be of value only to this relationship. This creates discomfort within the skin you were born into, chafing against the way you must act with other people. In the book, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, Jeremy Simms never feels comfortable within in his own skin because he is constantly having to change his identity for his white family and his black friends. This change is most obvious in a passage when he must try to live within both identities at the same time. In talking to a black friend he must stutter out, “She d-did, Pa. R-right now, ‘fore y’ll come, she did–” His white father cuts him short with “an angry gaze upon his son” causing Jeremy to “falter” and “[hang] his head.” This stutter is emblematic of the discomfort that Jeremy feels when talking to his father in the presence of his black friend. He is so uncomfortable that he cannot speak clearly. When forced to get back to his “white” relationship, he can no longer say the words that he most desires to. His relationship with others is directly responsible for paining his identity.

Teacher 2.0:

Impassioned secondary teacher wanted to create high-level small-class learning environment in a diverse school dedicated to reflective pedagogy, thoughtful technology integration, and teacher leadership.

General Job Responsibilities for all teachers at our school:

• Collaborate with team, department, and greater teaching community via both synchronous (essential question directed in-person discussion, Google Documents-style collaborative lesson planning, real-time chatting) and asynchronous methods (wikis, non-mass e-mails, Personal Learning Network reading and linking).
• Maintain a reflective teaching blog, podcast, and/or wiki which is focused upon finding solutions for classroom problems, creating more student engagement or acheivement as shown through authentic assessements and teacher anecdotal evidence rather than state-wide assessement scores, or generating new ways to connect to students, teachers, or other members of the education community.
• Read and interact with a Personal Learning Network made up of a few administratively selected educators and a vast majority of personally selected teachers, authors, and students who challenge you to become a better teacher.
• Create your own professional development objectives for the year based upon your passions and your readership of your PLN. The majority of the professional development time throughout the year will be based upon your own objectives.
• Create curriculum that can be shared, edited, and reproduced through creative commons licenses.
• Use non-graded e-portfolios as the exclusive means of assessment and personal student reflection.

Specific Job Responsibilities for the English Language Arts position:

• Create and maintain a digital authentic writing community, in which students are responsible for reflecting upon their own work, linking and commenting on others’ work, and understanding and controlling the direction of their own writing progress/process.
• Conduct project-based learning that asks students to address real-life issues through authentic writing and media creation.
• Use inquiry-based lessons to teach the conceps of textual analysis, considering all types of text (visual, auditory, and performance.)
• Model the creation of touchstone-texts and resources that produce well-balanced viewpoints of our world, and help students to do the same.
• Ensure that each student can question the validity of statements made in writing or in speech by verifying sources constantly.
• Cultivate each student’s unique writer’s voice so that the intentions of their writing meet the impressions of the reader. This process must include constant feedback, grammatical and conventions mini-lessons, and constant question asking as to the purpose of the choices that the student author has made.
• Conduct in-depth digital and conventional discussions on the nature of read and writing, user-selected texts, and thematic issues related to other curriculum.
• Model higher-level thinking skills in writing and verbal remarks to the class and expect the same high-level thinking from students.

I know that I will be adding to both of these lists quite a bit as my thoughts keep coming, but I thought that I would start off with these. Please let me know what you think of they way things truly should be in schools. Oh, and if anyone knows of a job like this out there, please let me know. I would love to be a part of a school that is this perfect. (I know that this doesn’t exist yet, but I suppose I can dream.)

The concept of critical mass has always been intriguing to me, but until recently I never saw the application to thought, teaching, or writing. For those of you who may be uninitiated, critical mass is the idea that there is some number of things (atoms, people, ideas, uproar, etc.) that it takes in order to create a desired action (attract more people, create a revolution, etc.). This means that it is very hard for one person to change the outcome of an election, but it is pretty easy for 10,000. This is a critical mass of people.

Well, I began thinking of what the critical mass of ideas was. If I think about the problem of world hunger for a minute, I probably won’t come up with any lasting solutions. But the question is: how many minutes do I have to think about it for me do so? How many different ideas do I need to have in order to create a critical mass, finding a path to a true answer that will actually work. For most of us it probably takes quite a few minutes and quite a few ideas to actually come up with answers. We have to consider all of the different possibilities and then pick the best one (and even then we are often wrong). It is my belief that only a true genius can see an answer from one idea. They are the only people who have a critical mass level of one idea or thought. The rest of us need more, and that is where other people come in.

If other people are not in the picture, if they do not put forth their ideas, drawing out more thinking from us, then very few things would ever get done. This is why teamwork and group participation is so important. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a discussion be born and die with a mere two comments from students. On the other hand, there are just as many discussions that reach a critical mass of comments, and every hand goes up. What is the critical mass of a discussion? I believe it is at least 3 hands up at a time, with at least one different idea. This is, however, just a working theory.

As for engagement, its critical mass is much harder to determine. I have been in many classes (Spanish in middle school) that I feel truly bored in. When I feel this way, it is very hard to become engaged in what is going on. How many thought-provoking moments does it take to draw me back in? How many times do I have to relate to the subject for it to work its way into my brain and take hold? The critical mass of engaging ideas is probably different for everyone, but for me it is considerably more than one. It also helps me when I have the tools at my fingertips to engage. If I have pen and paper at hand, I can better engage. If I have a laptop and a wireless connection, I can be looking up what we are talking about. I can be writing up notes. I can be making comments about the stupid things that people are saying around me (to myself). All of these things are aids to my critical mass of engagement. I wonder what this would be for each of my students.

I have talked quite extensively about memes and viral ideas and books, but I think that a critical mass of ideas is much bigger than one for writing. I have to hear/read about something a few times or at least be thinking about it a few times before I can comment on it, or incorporate it into my way of thinking. Blogging is the easiest format for creating critical mass that I have ever seen. You can collect ideas, aggregating them in your head, until the time when you have amassed enough of them to start writing about them. If you are running out of things to write about, start reading. Create a critical mass for yourself. Look around you, all of the ideas are staring right at you, waiting to be collected.

It is my position that entertainment is the driving force for the acceptance of unreality as reality. The reality shows of Cribs and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and even sitcoms such as How I Met your Mother and Two and a Half Men show us a distorted view of reality, but asks us to believe that it is real.

For the vast majority of us, there is no amount of hard work that will allow you to buy a 100 million dollar home. But even worse, most of the homes and cars displayed on Cribs are leased for the amount of time when the superstar is a superstar. Not even the most famous of our American celebrities can maintain an overly extravagant lifestyle for life.

Extreme Makeover seems to distort our concept of reality even further, though. It asks us to believe that if something bad happens to you, you will be repaid by the benevolent hand of a TV executive. If you lost a loved one to a long battle with cancer, you will receive a large house in return. This is not the case, no matter how much we may wish it were. Bad things will happen to all of us, and it is our responsibility to deal with them and work through them. No one is going to do the grieving for us.

As for the overly sexualized and stereotypical sitcoms that are on this season, reality seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of the writers for these shows. They are dedicated to bringing an escape from real relationships with actual emotions behind them. Instead, they show a flimsy and fake “dates” with multiple partners in each episode. It may be funny, but it certainly is not reality.

I know that I have not fully explored this topic, and this is for a reason. I hope that one of you will take up this idea and build upon it, either in support of my thesis or against it. I would love to start a great debate on the unreality of American entertainment, and this is my way of throwing down the gauntlet.

I happen to love the middle school perspective. It is so creative and thought provoking. It is the reason why I never plan on teaching at a high school. Yet, the middle school perspective has its limitations. I’m sure that I don’t need to enumerate them, but suffice it to say that even though I thought I knew everything when I was in the 8th grade, I actually didn’t. So, where do we get other perspectives? Well, we read good books, and we read interesting magazines. We watch terrible news channels, and we experience obnoxious movies. These pieces of entertainment, whether good or bad, all provide non-middle school perspectives, but there is only one problem with them: they weren’t written or performed just for us. All of the other perspectives in our lives are highly impersonal. Sure, we can relate to the characters in a book or we can understand that a news story will affect us personally, but they weren’t prepared in the same way that we prepare our Weekly Authentcs for one another each week. They weren’t prepared with just us in mind.

So, in order to correct this, in order to ensure that other perspectives drectly address us in the way that we address each other, I am introducing Guest Blogging into our community.

Each week, I will ask a group of “Adults” one question that you have voted on and at least one of them will respond in a blog post. You won’t know all of the people that I ask, and you won’t know who will answer. You will know, however, that each response from these other perspectives is just as authentic and sincere as the posts that we write each week.

I’m willing to bet that at this point you have at least two questions (although, you may have a heck of a lot more).

1. Who gets to be in this panel of “Adults?”

Well, anyone who wants to be. I will be asking parents, other teachers, administrators, professional bloggers, professional authors, and others to be asked the first batch of questions.

2. What kind of questions can we ask?

Pretty much anything that will get someone to tell a story, relive a memory, or relay some information. Things like, “What was the worst trouble that you ever got into, and what did you learn from it?” or “How did you deal with making friends in Middle School?” or “Is homework really important or are you just saying that so we don’t watch more TV?”

These guest bloggers are here for us to gain insight that we wouldn’t normally find. They are here so that we can listen to all of the voices around us, not just the ones that are standing in the front of the classroom or sitting in the back. We must use these voices, commenting on them and building upon them for these are the voices of our greater community, and to ignore them is to ignore the laughter, thought, and learning that comes along with them.

The first six letters hold an inordinate amount of power, and frankly, it makes me sick. The A’s, B’s and C’s have too long had a stranglehold on our schools. They hold students hostage all in the name of describing proficiency. The teacher in me has had enough inscribing a student’s ability onto the top of a paper and then watching students see it as a judgment of them as a person. Grades are supposed to foster growth, but instead they tear down self-worth. There is no purpose for grading students in a modern school because the process is inherently subjective, it promotes unnecessary competition, and it takes away time from authentic feedback that is necessary for student learning.

Grading lacks purpose in today’s schools because teachers are incapable of making completely objective grading decisions. Every time that a teacher looks at the student’s name on a paper, recognizes a student’s handwriting, or thinks about a student while entering grades, he or she is making a judgment call. It is difficult, even if only on a subconscious level, to dismiss all of the previous experiences with an individual students while grading. The heated argument with a teacher, the broken promise of making up work, the ridiculous disruption of the classroom that distracts all other students, these are all things that weigh upon a teacher. The fact is that teachers are human, and all humans have preferences. Playing favorites, although a universally despised practice, is alive and well in our current classrooms. The only thing that will solve this problem of subjectivity is getting rid of the entire grading process.

The worst kind of competition is also supported by modern grading practices. By wost kind, I mean the kind that promotes cheating, plagiarism, and outright intimidation by students who wish to maintain the edge against one another for the few A’s given at the end of each semester. There is so much pressure for students to do well that all emphasis on learning gets completely left behind. Grading, at its core, is all about incentives: you do this level of work, and you will get this grade. Well, what happens if you can find all of the answers to a test or worksheet on the internet? The incentive to do the work on your own simply disappears. The grade has become an end in itself, the goal for all students. It is no longer the well defined marker of success it was dreamed up to be. It does not show students where they are floundering, instead it is a measure of how well students can work the system and best other students in a competition for “Most Shortcuts Found in Learning Process.”

Authentic feedback is the backbone of any successful learning experience. Learning exactly how good you are at something from someone you respect and trust is essential. It allows you the opportunity to look critically at your work, making it better with each moment you spend collaborating with a well intentioned teacher. What I have just described is the ideal situation for modern education. The only problem is that it cannot exist due to grades. Authentic feedback is circumvented because a teacher must spend all of his/her time deciding how many points something should be worth, which standard an authentic learning activity falls into, and which stiff sounding descriptor vaguely defines where students are at in their work. Questions that cause students to dig deeper into a subject will never be asked so long as teachers must submit to the torture of grading every piece of paper that students put their names to.

Grades are holding back America’s children. These impressionable youngsters must constantly compete, many times dirtily, to maintain their standing amongst their peers. They must forgo any type of authentic information from teachers that would help them to engage further in their learning. They must even be labeled with subjective levels of proficiency, showing a complete lack of understanding for self-worth or purpose. So, if not grades, what else is there? I have shown here the beginnings of a comprehensive form of assessment, one that is authentic, intrinsic, and student directed. Students should always know their A, B, C’s, but their lives should never be defined in such trivial letters.

I really think that looking for the answers behind the words is so intriguing. There are so many things that we can learn about the words just by looking at their definitions or their contexts. Take the link for Imagination. It taught me about the difference between creative and reproductive imagination, and I believe that this definition enriches my understanding of the post. Is Hockey90 talking about imagination for things that have been or haven’t been experienced yet?

The other question that this post raises is that of how many other links besides dictionaries can be used to create greater contexts for our Weekly Authentics. I really feel challenged by this post to explore the concept of total linkage, so here is my response:

It is an open ended ecstasy to know who you are and what you want out of life, to have identity and purpose. But how do you find these things? Where can you look but within for answers to these questions.I used to think that there was a perfect way to be yourself, a version 2.0 that you could achieve if you changed enough, becoming more virtuous, loving and true. I would choose my words and ideas as well as I could, making myself the perfect being that I imagined was possible. After ever time I was my usual clumsy self, I would replay the situation in my head over and over until I knew what I should have done, what I should have said.

Lisa was the girl that I never kissed. We dated for 8 months and we never kissed. I think that is why we were so good together, though. We were always looking for things to talk about, so we wouldn’t have to approach the subject of us not being the slightest bit romantic. The unfortunate problem with this was that we ran out of things to talk about.

And I blamed it all on her. I commanded her to express herself more openly. I begged her to be more emotionally available. I was the better person, the sensitive guy that every girl dreams about. I didn’t think that asking for a few good conversation topics was too much. She did the right thing, though. She broke up with me.

Looking back, I can see that I was not the best version of myself, I was merely the most pompously sure teenage boy I knew. That is the problem with Identity and Purpose. If you have a false identity, you will also have an impure purpose, just like if you have no identity you will lack purpose. It took a Lisa for me to understand that. Have you found your Lisa yet?

We can never know what the future holds. For her, or for anyone. She is this thing, bright and new that I can’t quite see the end of. I want to know what she will be at 13, but I never want to stop seeing her at 0.

There is nothing abstract about her. She is real, here, now. I can speak about love, but there is no such thing as this kind of love. It doesn’t really exist. It is not something that you or anyone else can experience. It is mine. My wife may understand, other fathers and mothers may understand, but they do not feel this. I look at her and she is miraculous. I look at her and I am dumbfounded. I look at her and I find so many other inadequate adjectives. The best I can do is to only use nouns.

• Button (the kind that makes two very separate things close together)
• Eyes (the kind that are do dark and so knowing that you can’t look away when they are open)
• Nose (the kind that is trying to be every kind of hope imaginable)
• Smile (the one and only that I want to see)

I wasn’t in labor, and I didn’t have to push. I didn’t carry her for 10 months, and I didn’t wake up every day feeling sick. I can never be her mother, but I’m glad that someone can. You see, I owe her the whole of my belief that souls grip one another over a precipice, tight enough to either gain solid footing or be broken completely apart.

Soon she will stand on her own two feet. Soon she will think, and laugh, and be broken hearted. Soon, but not now.

For now she is bundled up tight. For now she is dependent. For now she is the best thing that I have ever known, not because of what she can become, her potential for greatness, but because of what she is already: my daughter.

So, I have taken it upon myself to look for better images. And what place is better for this kind of quest than in our writing community? In fact, I know of no other venue so creative and outlandish as to have writing about both ice-block feet and magical coins and keys.

To me, this high level of diverse thought is a direct challenge. It is a test to see how well we can hold together such fantastic ideas while all the while knitting closer together this community of writers. So, I put it to you. Can you find and put the following images together in one of your own authentic posts and link to all of the images that you have found to be useful? If you are the first person to post their scavenger hunt weekly authentic with correct links to each of the written images that you find, you will have the choice to drop any missing assignment you like, take home any book that you like from my bookshelf, or get a gift certificate for a pizza from anywhere you like. There will be five other prizes for the best scavenger hunt entries, so don’t feel like you have to rush through. Also, I would encourage everyone to comment on the posts that they find throughout this process, just to show the writers how much you appreciate their contributions to our community.
Let me first give you an example of what I am talking about:

Images-

1. Salt marks around the eyes (tears).
2. A flooded parking lot.
3. Ring of smoke.

I hoped that she couldn’t smell the salt, the eerie distaste in my mouth and around my eyes. I hoped that she didn’t know where I had been, but she could probably tell from my waterlogged sneakers. She had told me not to go out in the deluge that threatened even my eyesight. She had said that I would lose more than I would gain. She was right. She was always right.

This time, though, I knew I had to go. I had to leave, to get away. So, I took my favorite jacket, the one dad gave to me before he moved across the country. It didn’t really protect me from the elements, but it sure did protect me from my mental environment. I left her in her ring of smoke, holding on to the last cigarette she would ever need.

Now you try this Blogging Image Scavenger Hunt for yourself (you must use at least six images):

Images-

1. A bell ringing.
2. A dirty dog.
3. Insomnia (lack of sleep).
4. Broken bone or heart.
5. The left side of the body.
6. The beauty of snow.
7. Running away.
8. A roof.
9. A pen or pencil.
10. Mean brothers or sisters.

Update: You may now take a post your Scavenger hunt and look at the Scavenger Hunt Entries on our community navigator. Look for the posts that you would like to nominate as the best authentic image piece, which we will do next week. Prizes will be awarded at that time.

I want her to be here in my arms. I want to look at her and get to know her. I want her to be the perfect vision that I have seen for nearly ten months now. Is there anything that could happen now that I would care more about than my daughter coming. No, not a chance.

My mother told me that all my Kara has to do is to sit on the edge of the bed and put her hands on her stomach then say, “Baby out. Baby out.” I don’t see how it could not work. I just need my mind to switch over into “Dad mode.” I have seen glimpses of it when I am putting together Isabelle’s crib. I just can’t seem to make it stay. This overwhelming feeling of pride and hope. I want it to be with me always.

I am uncomfortably ready. Not uncomfortable in the sense that I don’t know what to expect. I don’t have the slightest clue of what to expect, but that is not why I am uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable because there is nothing left to do but wait. Sure, I could be planning lessons. I could be fixing the floor. I could be organizing the back room in the basement. I could, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but Isabelle.

She isn’t even here yet, and I am already willing to kill for her. I am willing to do anything to ensure that she is okay. There is no way to test this willingness except to put me into a situation of true peril, and I hope that never happens. I am confident, though, that were I to be faced with choosing to eat molten pieces of glass covered in anthrax and then jump from 1000 feet without a parachute or seeing my baby harmed in any way, I would pull up a glass of milk and choke the delicious glass down.

I just have one question. Not when, but why? As in why isn’t she here? Why isn’t she with me right now? Why is she waiting for one more instant? Doesn’t she know that I am ready. Doesn’t she know that I will give her a blessed love forever? Doesn’t she see the agony I am in just sitting here and typing out things that aren’t yet real when I could be looking at the only thing that matters to me right now? She should know. She should come. Now.

I don’t take this feeling lightly. Thinking is my favorite pastime. It is what I do when I am feeling bored. Think and write. Being too tired to think is torture, like seeing the cookie jar on the counter and being too small to reach it. And yet, the exhaustion of working through my ideas is too much for me right now. Mental drain is real, and every one of my formerly available faculties have been slowly sucked down. I haven’t even the ability to rub two brain  cells together to create the warmth of wit.

So, what can I do when my smarts smart? I start to explain things that are really going on. I give a play-by-play of everything I feel, because I have no filter, no way of getting around the inevitable.

I have a pile of papers to grade.

I haven’t written the lessons for when my baby is born.

My wife can’t sleep.

My dog keeps pooping in the house.

My tile floor keeps breaking.

I haven’t done my homework for Language Theory.

I’m not sure what else I can say. These are the things that make my mind mushy. These things weigh upon me, piling themselves on top of one another. So many others too. Also. In addition. As well.

It’s about speaking up without yet being spoken to.

It’s about survival.

It’s about making lists.

It’s about hoping to God that I have a few more hours.

It’s about a relentless search.

It’s about being open to something that hasn’t been dreamed of yet.

It’s about wringing out wet T-shirts.

It’s about not knowing how things will turn out and acting anyway.

It’s about running in place and getting winded.
It’s about feeling worthless.

It’s about The Glass Menagerie, West Side Story, and Waiting For Godot.

It’s about the history of all things beautiful.

It’s about crying when you recognize something.

It’s about mothers, and the absence of mothers.

It’s about wanting to wriggle away from all responsibility.

You see, I may be a fragile, murky, pedantic and obtuse, broken, fanatically supportive, fluid, wandering failure, but at least I’m not ugly.

Listen to this article

SoccerLover did a great job picking something that I could really connect to. She picked a representation of life through books that I find tantalizingly fulfilling. It did leave me with a few questions, though.

• What do I think about it?
• What does it mean to me?
• Do I think this metaphor for a book is accurate or could I come up with a better one?

Ultimately, I decided to take the challenge that I thought that this post represented.

You read A Book.

Its words are an inviting whisper, a nearly unspoken calling of laughter and thought. This playful friend beckons you to get lost, without a worry for finding your way back. It is Pan and his flute. It is the harmless apple in the Garden. It is a million possibilities that never really narrow down because they always reach the furthest recesses of your mind. It is the beautiful dancer that hypnotizes you until you forget that you are watching anything, you are such a part of the moment. It is the playmate that leaves you at the bottom of the gorge, with only your wits as defense. It is the bug that crawls in your ear just before you sleep and won’t let you forget that it is there, for the buzzing. It is a hopeless cause of remembrance on every page, the whole of yourself mirrored back to you, disfigured yet satisfying.

I am writing about what I am writing about. The right wrists placed near the right keys. The longer I think and write, the longer I rightly think. I have no concept of content, a supposed constant companion in an essay. This essay, though, this one right now lacks all content, so what is left? Style, my friend, style.

The essay, as a way of making meaning about a topic, is so perfect. In this way, I am writing about nothing. I can’t write about anything but what I am writing about. I have no point, but to be pricked by potent words. This is the writing that is continually reborn, every syllable is eating itself, turning itself inside out, and becoming the same again and again.

Just as a sine wave crosses the x-axis infinitely, writing about the words themselves is the freedom to come home as many times as I want. I can go deeper into the crevices of every word, seeing them as open and hopeful, more so than any others because these are words about words. This essay is as closed and open ended as a circle. It can never be about what it isn’t about.

I find purity in writing this essay. in its unending and unbeginning. Truly, all of these words cannot exist. They can only be within my head. But they are at my fingertips too, and because they are there, I love them. Once I start writing, I have changed what I am writing about. How can I then write about it? I love my paradoxical essay, my potent words without a point.

So, these words must blur together and leave no residue in your mind. I have said nothing about something many times over. That nothing, though, is so savory, so stylish. I could write about writing about nothing for a very long time.

I’m not sure that my student implied all of this when he wrote it, but I hope that he did (we’ll see when I show it to the class tomorrow). I like this type of recursion and metacognition. With a little bit broader scope, this kind of writing about writing could be actually useful in the classroom. Let me know what you think about this “instantaneous reflection.” Is it useful? Is it important to reflect upon every action you do as you are doing it? Do we do this naturally or do we need inquisitive 7th graders to point it out to us?