Blessed are the Irrelevant
Will’s Richardson’s and Miguel Guhlin’s posts today about the rate of uptake for read/write web integration in classrooms suggested a reading of the The Eight Beatitudes. The word irrelevant, that Miguel used, made me think about the benefits of being overlooked and passed by.
So, with the help of a thesaurus, I suggest a ninth Edublogger’s Beatitude:
Blessed are the irrelevant; for theirs is to find freedom in being beside the point, off the subject, peripheral, extraneous, and insignificant.
Will wonders if
at the end of the day, blogs and wikis and the like come closer to pen and paper technologies than most of what has come before and that because of that, they may finally be the tools that bring us to the point where we stop talking about technology and start talking about practice.
To which I say Amen!
In a more secular vein, as Huck Finn said to Tom:
I had to shove, Tom — I just had to. And besides, that school’s going to open, and I’d a had to go to it — well, I wouldn’t stand that, Tom. Looky-here, Tom, being rich ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar’l suits me, and I ain’t ever going to shake ‘em any more. Tom, I wouldn’t ever got into all this trouble if it hadn’t ‘a’ ben for that money; now you just take my sheer of it along with your’n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes — not many times, becuz I don’t give a dern for a thing ‘thout it’s tollable hard to git — and you go and beg off for me with the widder.”
As soon as we all get codified, standardized, and known downtown, where will all fun be?
There’s no need to lament.
Miguel Guhlin wrote,
Preach on, brother!
Link | August 29th, 2006 at 1:28 am
Artichoke wrote,
Have posted your ninth Edublogger’s Beatitude above my desk
Reminds me of Leunig’s “What a Fuss”
Each day - such a fuss,
Such praise, such damnation:
Ooh, aah, yes, no …!
Exhaustion and disintegration
Such a fuss, yet the goat
Eats little flowers and thorns
And hears the sparrow
Singing brightly in his horns
(The sun is sweet, the afternoon lies sleeping in the valley),
A song for little flowers and thorns
Digesting in the belly.
Link | September 2nd, 2006 at 1:21 am
Doug wrote,
More Leunig: On Picasso and the Bull:
Artist, leave the world of art,
Pack your goodies on a cart,
Duck out through some tiny hole,
Get away and save your soul.
Leave no footprints, don’t look back,
Take the dark and dirty track ;
Cross the border, cross your heart;
Freedom from the world of art.
For example: “THE FRENCH PAINTER PIERRE Bonnard was feeling very depressed one day so his friends took him to the Louvre in Paris to look at the art - and it was observed that he spent a lot of time staring out through the windows. When the visit was over and the group had departed, they paused for coffee and reflected about what had impressed them most. “I liked the windows best of all,” offered Bonnard.”
Thank you, Artichoke.
Link | September 2nd, 2006 at 8:16 am