Saturday, May 05, 2007

Tear Down the Walls


The American Literature Classroom has been rebuilt (many thanks to Eloise Pasteur for her faithful service).

classrooms in 3D. Corporate classrooms. Corporate culture. I started to hum Pink Floyd's, "Tear Down the Wall" tune. I started to get itchy. I was starting to need virtual Everywhere I look, the classrooms look like RLbenadryl.



My alternate reality simply can not be like my reality.


So, I tore it all down.

The picture above is the new classroom. It is an overgrown forest because the theme of the course is "Creating a National Literature." To create it, the real people had to start in wilderness; to understand it...students have to return. They will shape this forest as we shaped this culture.



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I am very thankful to the participants today; they helped me see how this teaching environment will work. It wasn't easy, and I wouldn't help them.












But they sorted through the mud and got the point. Shaping something out of nothing and finding hidden treasure in the unkown is hard...but we value that which we work hardest to achieve.

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