My eyes are shot. I have been sketching approaches to on-line classes all day when I realized that what I want is a website that will supplement what I am doing in the classroom. I want projects, resources, and information that my students can use outside of class to make their learning richer. I want interaction. But I also want something a home-bound student or a home-schooled student could pick up and go with. All the web development sites and resources tell me that is the wrong way to go about building a web site. But a big, sprawling site feels right to me. I am thinking about an old bookstore I used to haunt in downtown Louisville, Zimmermans. His books were sometimes stacked neatly, sometimes in boxes, sometimes in great tall stacks with their spines turned so that you had to unstack them. That's how I feel about this prefab notion of building a learning environment. I would prefer to grow a learning tree. Some parts die, some parts grow. Sometimes a storm blows the whole freaking mama to the ground.

That brings me to change. Part of me is appalled by the philosophy of constant change. Why the hell should I, for example, concern myself with an article about e-books. It's a crappy technology that is nearly stillborn. Yet... I know some version of electronic portability will be born and grow. And so it means climbing the learning curve every day with no guarantee that the hard-won knowledge won't be lost like some Sysyphean stone that crushes the life out of you. That is real teaching... the opportunity to constantly regale your friends with the depth and breadth of your foolishness. Teachers must be early adopters, they must struggle with new ways of learning no matter how feeble because they might just grow from a palsied childhood to greatness. It takes real courage to say to yourself that nothing you do will ever be good enough. But I hate change... I think John Berryman once said in a sonnet that risks may be our safeties in disguise. I put my hope in that paradox. I put my heart in the safety of change.