It may be the pressure of new school year ambitions weighing on me, with one eighth of the academic year gone, and with the strongest sense of being still at the beginning stage with this group of students, that two posts seem to describe this rocky hard place.

The Rock
Reporting on the stone, Artichoke recalls a quote by Charles Taylor, taken from the forward to a book by David Cayley called The Rivers North of the Future, as she muses about the “the future of learning in a networked world,” a quote she mentioned a while ago:

“It speaks of a hoped-for “not yet,” time and a place that cannot be reached by simply projecting from the present, since it lies north of the future. And, even in these inaccessible waters, the nets that can be cast out are “burdened with stone-engraved shadows,” the weight of all that has been.” (Charles Tayor in Foreword - Cayley 2005)

That haunting phrase, “the weight of all that has been,”….is palpable for me. It is the rock that I’ve carried from the day I took on the job of making a difference. Having picked it up, there is no place to set it.

A Hard Place
A hard place is mapped in Will Richardson’s Discovering Content. Will observes that

The real shift is with the stance of the teacher. This idea forces us to move away from delivering content as we have for 100+ years and instead move toward assisting students to discover content on their own.

Stance is, indeed, the key to helping students, but that stance needs to be applied to creating a context in which the content can be expressed. That context involves more than technology. The context includes what is said, and what’s allowed to be said. The context includes what is read, and what’s allowed to be read. The context includes scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, and critical awareness of unvoiced assumptions in all texts.

Will is correct; it is risky. The teacher’s stance must thoughtfully negotiate the line between freedom and authority. David Warlick has been asking about quality of field, which this issue turns on. Clarence Fisher offers constructive examples.

I can’t plan for the “future of learning” because any future is an imaginary projection, inaccessible, and still only “hoped-for.” I plan for Monday, and Tuesday, and…. I struggle with learning in the present, a very hard place when you look at a room full of kids with mismatched needs, every day.

Anyone with a vision of The Possible starts from the beginning each new year, at best, and often has to wade through heartbreaking difficulty to do even a little good work. There is no program for change, and I’ll head the other way if I ever see one.