The Way Things Are
I think I am more like the flapping duck that rails hopelessly against the way things are. I am certainly not the resigned horse, nor am I what the Zanders are trying to get us to understand either. I am not at the point yet that I can sit back at what I consider a wrong or injustice and say that is the way it is, now lets go from here. I guess I have sat and watched things either not change or change so slowly that it hardly seems like any change at all. I think part of that comes as I live in the age of now. I want food I can get it now, I want music and can download it now. There is hardly anything that I can not get right now, except change.
It also interested me when the text started talking about the way things should be versus the way things are. I can recall several times that I have had a student complain about something being unfair. They tell me it should be another way. Yet when I point out that things are this way and what are they willing to do to change that fact, they give up. I do not know if my students are representative of the general public, but I am willing to bet that more people prefer to complain about the way things are rather than do anything to change them.
The downward spiral talk section was good information as well. Get four teachers in a room discussing education and the downward spiral talk begins. We are the worst nation in education. These kids are un-teachable. There isn’t enough money, and so on. I can say that this program has always concentrated on the positive side of education and what we can do to change the world in which we live and work.
Giving Way to Passion
If I had to give an example of passion I would be hard pressed. Passion is something that is very repressed in my family. I remember when I graduated from High School and the speaker spoke of living your passion. I loved the speech and asked my Father what he thought about it afterward. I received a ten-minute lecture on passion being a sin that takes us away from God’s path. Needless to say, passion is a quiet expression in my life. I do try to be passionate about my work though. I come prepared and I try to make everyday interesting and exciting for the students and myself. How can your students be excited about the subject if you are bored of it?
Lighting a Spark
I hope I am doing a lot to pay forward my possibility. I do not think I am doing as much as Ben Zander in starting a philharmonic project in the rougher parts of England. However, I did choose to become a teacher after years of success in the business world. In doing so I was hoping to show students that with an education and some hard work that they can have many of the things that they dream of. It amazes me that many of my students do not think that they will ever see Europe in person. I have had to put that dream in their head so that it will percolate and some day they will act on it. Perhaps that is how we pay the possibility forward, we create dreams that others can act on.
Accepting things the way they are isn't about sitting back and throwing one's hands up as much as using that idea of the way things are as a starting place to make change happen. There is no assigning blame (a later chapter), no nostalgia for times that never really were, just starting from where one finds oneself. Maybe things aren't "fair" (no new revelation there), so what do we do to make things better?
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