Anthro/Apologist

After a three year hiatus from the world of informal education, this week marks my return to not just one but two jobs in education! Hooray! I’m back!!

I have learned a lot in the last three years—in jobs ranging from wildlife conservation to fry cook to event planning—and I have found that the distance from working in education wasn’t all bad. I’ve learned what I’m good at—improvisation, empathy, creativity—and what I need to work on—organization, time management, active listening, humility and confidence. I have also learned that what I want to do in my professional life is more than strictly learning and teaching. As a child I was lucky enough to learn around adults with intellectual passions. My grandfather’s rock and mineral collection, my octogenarian friend John’s shell collection, my dad’s ham radio and electrical engineering, my mother’s love for history and place. There were no lesson plans or goals, just people being happy and focused learning about and doing what they found interesting. More than this: they had other jobs. These were history teachers and realtors and lawyers and computer programmers. They were not Ph.D.-wielding professors or engineers, but each one was driven to learning more, sharing more and finding other people who wanted to be part of the conversation.

While I worked at a bagel shop in my neighborhood this winter, I met so many fascinating people who drew me to learn more. They brought me books and invited me to libraries and rooms full of maps and told me about places where I could see the planes take off and watch the weather roll in. If you give them a cup of coffee, a muffin, and just a bit of human interest, the wonderful, passionate nerds of the world will teach you and learn with you. So what if you can’t spend all day serving coffee and leaning on a counter gabbing? How can we make a concerted effort to surround ourselves and our communities with these true human resources? My goal is to create a space for a holistic learning community to find itself. I will use this blog as an interactive scratch pad, where I can run through thoughts and shapes of learning, and hopefully by sharing them with people with skills and perspectives outside of my own I will be able to hone them. As a freelancer, my peer groups are changeable and often focused on our shared project. To complement this, I would like also to use this as a space for looking at the long view and for keeping myself accountable to my professional goal of community learning.

I’m sharing this with people who I think will bring insights and openness to new ideas from many fields. Inspiration comes from many places, so I’ll be making this a forum for more than just pedagogy (though that too).