music: Phish- 4/5/98, Providence, RI
“I can’t possibly accomplish all that I want to achieve…”
That is how the final piece to my TEP portfolio started. It speaks volumes, and on many levels: I want to do it all, but I know that if I’m both lucky and good, I still won’t come close to doing it all. But I will still try. I wrote the above line in reference to my becoming a teacher, but it could very well apply to most things in my life, including this weblog, but for the past couple of days I have been considering the notion with relation to the ideas generated and the training I received in beoming a teacher. I have finished my graduate program; I am now for all intents and purposes a ‘Master of Education’ and a ‘Harvard graduate.’ Both seem fairly meaningless from where I stand right now, but whatever social capital they carry will most likely become useful one day in accomplishing my goals. On that most shallow of levels, I hope I can be considered by the world-at-large properly credentialed to know what I am talking about. To some extent.
This has been a very intense and emotional week. I have been confronted with numerous goodbyes to people whose presence I have taken for granted this past year and who I do treasure immesurably. This week has been more about expressing my appreciation for these people and achieving some sort of closure with them than synthesizing what I have learned in class and in practicum. About 10 of us went out to Walden Pond today after a game of football on Cambridge Common, and in that trip, I was confronted with one of those essential facts of life: what is important is the people you meet. We have done a good job of celebrating each other this week with multiple nights out, a talent show last night, and extended nights out. It is tough to think that I am saying goodbye to so many of these people, but it is heartening to know that we are to spread out and do some of the most important work our society has.
This has been a week riddled with ritual and ceremony. I liken this entire voyage to my LTIII summer at camp, a position of training, yet one of incredible responsibility. I can not easily pin down a list of things that I have learned this year, but I can say that I am quite different now than when I started. I shared my thoughts regarding education, and urban education in particular to members of my cohort this past week, and in doing so reinforced my own beliefs and rededicated myself to the goals and values I have set for myself. It was, in many ways, like taking an academic rag. The formal year ended with some degree of ceremony, both at HGSE and at my school site, and we, apparently, are now set on our ways to live out what we have learned. I have refocused and distilled my vision for education’s role in society over the past couple weeks and while I have something to show for that work, I don’t think that it is complete. I think I have a blog entry about my vision of the Revolution in the making and will let things simmer a little longer before i dive into that.
Perhaps I am too close to the event still. Perhaps I have not made the mental break with grad school and student teaching because I will continue to teach until the end of the school year and still have to plan lessons and grade homework. Perhaps I am presently too tired to really dig into what this past year’s training and learning meant for me. Perhaps all three, and then some. Whatever the case may be, I have completed this mini-journey, and in the final analysis am better for it. I can not possibly hope to accomplish all that I want to achieve, but I can push towards it hard enough to make some sort of positive impact.
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never” -
“YOU LIE!” he cried,
and ran on.
-Stephen Crane
Posted by davidtaus at May 16, 2004 01:46 AM