Finally

I am unbelievably moved.  I have just finished reading an article for my online class for TGC, and it says almost exactly what I have always believed to be true.  It's not just me.  There are other people out there, people who publish and who write and who are listened to who think that this kind of education and philosophy are important, too.  I am not alone.

It's incredible.  Not since I left Indiana have I felt this way.  For just a minute, for just these few precious minutes, I don't feel like a freak or an outcast.  I feel like there are people who understand where I'm coming from, who might understand my basic philosophy of education and not look at me like I have three heads.  I've found a few here and there since I left EFL, but they've been very rare.  In the K-12 world I've found myself immersed in, these ideas have seemed so foreign and so little talked about that I have begun to doubt that anybody else cares about them, that they could possibly be important.  They do not, after all, directly seem to impact the goddamn state test scores....

This feels in so many ways like a homecoming, like a return to a land that is green and logical after a sojourn in a place that is in decay and filled with insanity.  We can teach our students to see themselves as a part of a greater world; we can teach them to be independent thinkers who use integrated approaches to tackle a curriculum that is presenting the material in relevant and applied ways.  We can.  We should.  And what wonders are possible if only we will.  It is not an easy change.  So much work is involved.  How can we not, though, when we know what the rewards of doing it and the costs of not are?