I’d like to offer you “A Thank you Note”, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.

The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.

Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don’t wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don’t even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them anything”,
love would have said
on this open topic.

(Podziękowanie translated from Polish by Joanna Maria Trzeciak)

Going back to school in February just confirmed once again that change just does not seem to happen in closed environments.  Same conversations in the teachers’ room, same unsolved problems from 25 years ago and endless meetings, during which there is more red tape than a decision to act.

School more than ever feels like prison with its tight unvarying schedule, routine and very little room for emergence, creativity and “organized chaos”. Focus is on discipline and control so students’ inventiveness and ingenuity are proven by subverting it. Teachers drone, kids get bored by looking at the nape of the same neck for hours and cannot sit still. With instructional technology alone, the difficulty in staying on task – they connect to social sites, message their friends, play games. Same problems as ages ago, just “enhanced” by educational technology. Kids will be kids.

In March, visits, new acquaintances, conversations, exchanging ideas and practices in different areas and levels: Lumiar school, Papagallis, The Hub, VivoEduca and some fun creative play online with Inkscape in a remix challenge.

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” – Picasso

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream” Malcolm Muggeridge

“Kites fly highest against the wind” Winston Churchill

Some educators, by wearing the “edupunk” label and embracing the DIY cause, remind me of Camus:

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

However, this quote by Vaclav Havel is the one which for me illustrates best how I have felt this tension.

“You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”