I had too much to dream last night
Process: I generally spend some time Friday afternoon or evening assembling the links and trying to come up with a topic for my Saturday essay. If I come up with some vague sense of what it is I want to write about, I try thinking about it as I drift off to sleep, in the vague hope that not only will I dream something that will coallesce into wisdom, but that I will remember what I dreamed. The remembering part mostly doesn't work so good.
Last night I tried sleeping with the following comment I made in whogotthegravy's diary Surprise! Kids want to go to college. You know what would be great though?Higher education is the key to finding a rewarding job and earning a higher income. It would be great if everyone remembered, especially students, that this is not the purpose of getting an education, but rather the result. It's not the job of teachers to prepare students for a better job. It's the job of teachers to teach students how to think and how to learn. The better job business is incidental to that effort.
Robyn I believe that I was successful in the dreaming part, but once again the output is drifting away before I can capture it all. But it triggered memories anyway and maybe it will all hang together in what follows.
This weekend is the first anniversary of my joining DailyKos. I'm not sure exactly what day I joined because it didn't seem important to make a note to myself about it. So maybe today is my anniversary, or maybe it's tomorrow, and it could even be Monday. But the actual date is substantially unimportant. I believe people should celebrate whenever they have a chance.
In honor of the occasion serendipity happened. As most of you probably know, I also post Poem du Jour at Cheers and Jeers most weekdays. I'm currently running through the 100 poems I wrote specifically for Poem du Jour, pretty much in chronological order. It just so happened that the poems posted Thursday and Friday were about teaching. Here they are, in the hopes that you too can join in the celebration of being a student or a teacher:
Art Link Sensory Input
A Teacher
What more could
anyone want to be
than a studier
learning what one wants
or needs to learn
so that one can
learn more
each nugget of wisdom
parsed again and again
into 17 different contexts
just for the fun of it
joyously reading
for the knowledge contained
or just to view
the style
in which it was presented
levels upon levels
of viewpoints
and knowledge
always knowledge
deeper and broader
at the edge
of human experience
and beyond
forever knowledge
both profound and absurd
and eventually
for the lucky industrious few
getting paid to think
and help others
along their own paths
to enlightenment?
I am a teacher
--Robyn Elaine Serven --February 22, 2006 |
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Art Link Wave
The Way
To learn
is the most
profound achievement
a human can
accomplish
To teach
is the most
exquisite gift
a human can
bestow
To do both is to accept
the duty to
lead the people
out of the Darkness
--Robyn Elaine Serven --February 24, 2006 |
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I wonder whatever happened to human society that brought us to the present condition, where children become convinced that their educational careers are simply a preamble to their employment lives, that every effort of the teacher should be targeted towards helping them get a good job. I wonder how many of them think that education can or should stop when they get that job they want. I wonder about how much depression is going to result from them spending their lives in careers that have been chosen because of the pay scale rather than because the work is something they enjoy doing, maybe even to the point that they would do it anyway even if they weren't paid for it. I wonder about how many people even think about these things.
I wonder about a human society in which the focus is not to learn about things, but rather to accumulate wealth. I wonder about education becoming a stepping stone rather than an end in itself and how much of its meaning is lost because of that. I wonder if I have been born in the wrong time or place.
I wonder.
--Robyn Serven --Bloomfield College, NJ |