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The Road Home By Matthew Beaudin

In the winter, the roadside fences look like fresh sutures holding the land together. 

The road leaves Montrose, CO gently before the sagebrush seas near Gunnison. It gives way to frozen farmland and the jutting towers of Monarch pass. Atop the pass, the store marking the Continental Divide is buried, its roof only peeking out from underneath the enormous drifts.

The road drops down into Salida before it’s a silver thread stitching the Arkansas River valley to the Collegiate peaks. If the earth were to come apart, it might split right there. 

It’s an arrow to Manitou Springs from there, where my father and step-mom live, or a windy, depressed road to Denver with a lone gas station every 30 minutes, ablaze in the dark and shattering cold, jewels against the blackness. 

They look forgotten, those stores.  

I know the road’s turns, where the pavement changes colors, and where to stop along the way if I’m tired, hungry or lonely. I know it as well as I know myself. I’ve slept in my car in parking lots along the way, the dog and I in a sleeping bag in the -13º below night. Sometimes I pull over and walk the dirt roads that shoot off the highway, veins across the public lands. There’s a dirt road near Sargents, CO, that our family dog would run down chasing the over-loaded car for miles, because he was too stubborn to get in unless he was foaming-at-the-mouth tired. Bluu was his name. An unstoppable 100 pound lab and setter mix. 

For years it’s meant different things to me, this road. When I was little, it was the road to my dad’s home in Colorado Springs from our summer house — a pitched tent and the public pool — in Gunnison. 

He was back in school then, working for his teacher licensure. We’d backpack on the weekends and eat pack-smashed PB and J tortillas for five meals out of six. 

In high school, it was the way to stadiums burning holes into the Friday night black. It’s strange to think of that now.

Years later, after I moved to Telluride, it was the way to Denver, the fabric of a first love unraveling over empty miles. Wearing with the tires. 

It has been the way to things I’d rather not go to ever again. A suffocating tunnel of pavement and oppressive sky on the way to a funeral. I was run over by the tugboat clouds.

It was the way here, or what became the way home. 

It collides with my past and present, but the future is nothing here but snow whispering over pavement, there and gone. 

Now, it’s a road to someplace that used to be home I struggle to define and embrace. The place between things. Home is the other way.

I glance out the window now in the middle of the drive to the Front Range from Telluride on 285 and wonder what it will mean next. Things are always changing on this road. On this day, I’m driving to a job interview away from Telluride that may mean the begging of another home. Another chapter of my life, being written right now on this lonely Colorado road. I love it profoundly because I’ve grown up with each mile marker in each season. It’s my diary. 

Some days on 285, the world is saturated in color. I’ve seen the winter colors beaming, the grasses bleached white and the reds of the bushes bleeding out.

Some days, even the sky plays backup: The clouds, enormous silver puffs, sailing on the plains, leaving town-size stamps of shade on yellowed valley below.

But not this day.

MG Siegler in his latest TechCrunch article posits that although Apple’s new iBooks strategy is admirable in its effort to fix problems in public high schools, that it’s not realistic and that their market strategy should revolve around colleges and college textbooks.

On the surface, which seems logical enough, his argument is sound. But It ignores the one, HUGE driving force in education: money.

Nearly all high schools are public, or receive public funding in one way or another and help to satisfy the law which states that students of high school age must attend school. Textbooks are merely a means of teaching these students topics which help these schools qualify for their funding.

That’s basically the business model for most high schools in the US. Teach what the state and federal governments mandate to receive funding. Universities do not work that way. Even so called “public universities”. These are institutions that operate on revenues, which come from donations, returns from investments, tuition, and from selling products. That last item is particularly important when applied to the university bookstores.

Bookstores are profit centers for universities. Big ones. As tablets (by tablets, I really mean iPads) have come out over the last few years startups have emerged to help university students get their hands on digital textbooks. And it’s exciting. We can look at the the progress they are making and feel like the education world is progressing. But it isn’t. Kno, one of the most prominent digital textbook sellers, still only offers a very small percentage of textbooks required for university classes. And many textbooks still require the purchase of a physical book to qualify for the digital version. This is because students are currently not the customers of textbook publishers. University bookstores are. And by removing the university bookstore middle man, you evaporate millions of dollars in revenue for each university. And they know this. And are fighting hard for the publishers to maintain the current model.

Here’s where Apple’s brilliant strategy comes in. They know the power of amazing devices in markets. They know the strength of the consumer’s collective voice. They watched as the nation coalesced behind their $.99 solution for music, which ended up cutting the size of the music industry in half. The new iBook textbooks are being marketed in a way that circumvents the university bookstore. Brilliant. Go right to the student in high school. Make them a true believer. Give them an amazing textbook experience starting in 9th grade. By the time these students hit university in 4 more years they aren’t going to know how to not use an iPad while studying. The iPad will be synonymous with learning, and that’s when education shifts. If textbook publishers continue to exclude students from their market strategy students will take matters in their own hands. Things will get crazy. And that’s when industries get disrupted. When the end user is fed up and frustrated and motivated to make a difference. And college students have always been the most adept protestors and rioters.

Apple, by going high school first, is applying the heat to university textbook publishers and bookstores. They are saying “Fine. If you won’t work with us, then we’ll empower a generation to change your industry for you.”

And they will.

In the second video, it is clear that Ari is the “winner”. Does that mean that the kid in black “won” the first video’s fight?

The reason I ask is because a similar scenario occurred when I was in High School. I thought it was a simple maturity issue back then, but if the stakes (i.e., peoples’ and firms’ reputations) were bigger like in the Entourage video, bullying is clearly the “best” strategy.

Dear Schools,

How is being suspended a punishment for skipping?