Desire Number One: A Virtual Return to Coffee-House Days

Okay, my mind’s awhirl with things I want to do. Many of them were impossible before now. Now they’re possible. So…identify the desire, then voice it–and maybe it will happen.

“Desire” should have been plural. So I’ll start with…

Desire Number One: Back, Virtually, to the College Coffee-House

I don’t know this guy, but I knew this court-yard
–and that maple tree–every day for eight rich, penniless years:
Espresso Roma, Eugene, Oregon. Source

Look around,
You’ll find the ground
Is not so far
From where you are–
But don’t be too wise.

For down below
They never grow
They’re always tired
And charms are hired
From out of their eyes….
Never surprised.
–Nick Drake

The campus coffee-house during those undergrad years: you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? (Or did you have to be a slightly affected liberal arts student back then?) For me, it was Cafe Roma in Eugene, Oregon. Don’t you remember those days? The discovery, for the first time, of the Great Books, the composers and jazz musicians, the poets, the philosophers? The intoxication these brought? The new horizons? The “mind,” as someone said, “feeling itself alive”?
And, best of all, the community of like-minded thinkers? The friendships that started because you and some stranger at a campus coffee house happened to be reading the same mind-blowing book, so you morphed from enthralled solo readers to enthralled reader-friends by the end of that first (probably hours-long) conversation?

Didn’t you have those conversations?

And hasn’t post-collegiate life always seemed barren by comparison?

And didn’t you find yourself expecting that, when you got your teaching job, you’d finally again enjoy those conversations among kindred souls? Among co-workers who had chosen, after all, to give their lives to teaching the same subject you’d chosen to spend your life teaching too? Didn’t you look forward to finally finding an oasis of conversations among non-mundane fellow travelers?

To talk, finally, again, about ideas? About beauty, art, and idealisms of all kinds?

And weren’t you disillusioned to discover that, with precious few exceptions, those fellow travelers were nowhere to be found? That the conversations never happened? That most of your colleagues seemed too tired, too busy, too jaded, too–something–to rekindle that old fire? “Alway tired…charms hired / from out of their eyes… / never surprised.“

I thought about this today because my school just broke for a five-day Lunar New Year holiday. Over and over, I had conversations in which I asked fellow teachers if they were traveling (all said yes), and they asked me if I was (I said no), and most of them said some variation of, “Don’t work too hard.”

I appreciate the kindness of their intention, of course, and do understand the allure of Thailand or the Philippines during this Korean February. But that’s not the point. The point is–and it took these exchanges for me to pinpoint it–if I “work” so much (and I do), it’s because I really love this “work.”

I love the freedom to stay home for this holiday to play with a new history project idea (to me, mind you–some other teachers have already done this. But not many.). I can’t imagine anything more interesting to do with my free time. If that sounds sad, that’s you, not me. I love it. I love this work.

I love this work because it feels like a mixture of temple, playground, and laboratory.

It’s a temple, to strain the obvious, because I’m paid to generate curiosity, meaning, and creativity about the peak moments of human history and literature–and generate it among fresh, young souls. Eighty 15-year-old minds waking up (to varying degrees, of course) to the wonders of Galileo’s new vistas, Gilgamesh’s timeless discovery, Homer’s pathos and humor, on and on and on. Every “wow” a “hallelujah.”

It’s a playground because they’re old enough to think, but young enough to play–and so am I, still (this is why I think I would languish with college students). The child in all of us is not yet dead. (Amen.)

And it’s a laboratory because of this blog, that wiki, that iPod, video camera, cell-phone, Skype button, on and on and on. I feel like Edison must have when he started to understand all possible uses of electricity. (Sorry, we’re studying the Second Industrial Revolution right now.)

So this “work” is at the same time not work. If I haven’t watched television for the last six months–and I haven’t, period–it’s because this is so much more interesting.

It’s so interesting, in fact, that for the first time since the undergrad years decades ago, my mind feels that alive again.

But there’s still that problem: the coffee-house conversations still aren’t there. Nobody in my neighborhood is saying, “Yeah, let’s have a latte and discuss Richardson and Warlick, Fisch’s videos and everybody’s latest blog posts, Friedman’s World is Flat and School 2.0.”

And that does leave a void.

But today, I realized–web 2.0 doesn’t only demolish classroom walls; it doesn’t only flatten the educational world. It also demolishes neighborhood boundaries too.

Those coffee-house conversations about how to get to School and Teacher and Student 2.0 can happen now–though the coffee may be served from counters three thousand miles apart–via Skype.

I already know some people “reading the same books.” They’ve joined the 1001 Flat World Tales project. They’re there. Conversations are waiting to happen about, well, how to make this project happen. And the next one. And the next one.

I know other people, too, though they don’t know me. I read them every day in Bloglines.

So Michele, Chris, Chad, and everybody else already or soon to be on board: let’s set a time (it’ll have to be GMT). Let’s get that headset and microphone. Let’s download Skype. And let’s put on some coffee (wine’s okay too), start a conference call, and start the conversations.

Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the edublogosphere is divided into two hemispheres. The first one is the ICT folks–the edtech coordinators who seem often to be fighting uphill battles to get teachers to try this stuff.

And the second hemisphere? It’s us. Classroom teachers doing it–and doing it messily, to be sure. We’ve got great tools, but not much by way of maps.

The ICT folks are the theorists, and we’re the practicioners. We’re the Thoreaus to their Emersons. Each is necessary to, needed by, the other. They need us, and we need them.

But when I look at the educational podcasting landscape, I see mostly products of the first hemisphere, not the second.

So let’s fill that void. Our questions, ideas, experiments, results–our conversations about these things–are so relevant.

They should be transparent too. Let’s model the messiness, the excitement, the spirit. Let’s return to the coffee-house, and talk about what we love. I’ll just hit “record” before we do.

Any takers? (1001teachers folks, you’re on notice.)

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