You Know It When You See It
Teachers know what great learning looks like,
and it doesn't require rows or silence,
a projector or compliance, or people
of authority strategically placed to monitor
behavior or check for understanding.
Great learning has a purpose that blooms
through the body. It is a stretching of stems
and leaves toward the sun that always provides.
It is the procreant urge and urge of curiosity
from seed to sprout to reaching organism,
as essential as photosynthesis.
Great learning is the civic and social surging
of connections: electrical grid, communication
network, sanitation system, public transportation.
Great learning combines us and gives us access
to the many roads we travel together as citizens.
Great learning builds museums and monuments
and brings together neighborhoods.
Great learning is entering parenthood,
watching with amusement and terror and joy
each breath and shift and closing of the hand
of the infant notion that we know in our DNA
and that grows through steps and sounds.
With great learning we wait up at night,
and we struggle with our impulses to celebrate
and smother, to protect and to share.
We lose ourselves and mature at a different tempo.
Great learning is the intrepid search for the interior
of unexplored continents, the putting on of boots
and helmets, the putting to use of rope and telescope.
Great learning is spanning chasms and summiting peaks,
following rivers and crawling through caves.
It is the act of capturing in notebooks creatures
that sting and flowers that sooth. It is clearing trees
to create a space for ourselves and marking that space on the map.
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