So yesterday’s post rolled around in my head for a while… and as often seems to happen these days… the comments that folks wrote and the posts that others wrote in response forced me to make sure my thoughts kept evolving. (And hey, isn’t that the point?)

Tom Hoffman wrote:

Annenberg put what, $500 million into "large scale educational change?" I don’t even know how much the Gates Foundation has sunk into it. Expecting bloggers to change things quickly is a little unrealistic.

And that’s important to remember. It’s easy to get caught up in all this and think that we have to change the entire educational system… and we have to do it now, now, now, but as Christian writes:

I’m not sure when the rule was laid down that any blogging — whether it be about education or technology or some wonderful hybrid or about collectors of guinea pigs or whatever your bag of raisins — that it had to change the world on any level.

From both Tom and Christian, I take away patience — as hard as it may be to have it. We are changing things. Slowly… incrementally… one school… one classroom… one district at a time. And we are doing it at a time when the overarching edu-political landscape isn’t exactly welcoming the kinds of reforms many of us are writing about and working to implement. And yet, we’re doing it anyway.

As Brad Hoge wrote:

As for pulling taffy, I’ve been doing that my entire career. Education reform moves very slowly and with a lot of bumps in the road. It often proceeds by affecting one teacher or one administrator at a time and is often reversed higher up. The trick is to keep pulling even though you know there are others at the other end pulling back. Every once in a while you will make a difference to a teacher who might happen to read your blog or hear of an issue you help to promote through the grapevine. I think the trick to making the edu-blogosphere effective will be to bring more teachers into the fold. Blogging should be part of more projects (such as HUNSTEMahem). It will be slow growth, but we’ve got to keep pulling.

Education reform takes too long. Few of us in the field would dispute that. It’s hard when, every day, we see kids who desperately need the reforms we’re pushing for, and we know that for most of those kids, the reforms will come too late.

But we also have to ask ourselves what already has changed by what we’re doing… and again, I quote Christian’s response:

maybe it’s ‘okay’ if for once, educators and IT guys and the infinite population of those ‘in the trenches’ can step out of their private domains, open the door to their private classrooms, let go of their private roles, and simply take a seat at the larger table. And agree that it’s not the answer that will unite us and profoundly change education for the better, but it is the willingness to be in this together, to co-author the ‘journey’ itself, the acceptance that none of us knows how it will all play out no matter how bright or experienced we may be.

But I’ll tell you one thing, if the simple act of blogging can create a network of curious souls who otherwise would have never met, let alone tackled great questions together, and if maybe this entire blog wunderkind can help a few teachers make peace with what Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach identifies as the conflict between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ lives of a teacher, then hey, maybe ‘action’ already took place…and we might be okay after all.

Maybe.

The problem is the "maybe," of course, but at the same time, all this technology hasn’t made us get any better at seeing the future. But given how it’s widening our perspectives, maybe it has made us get a lot better at seeing the present. And that’s a good thing.

But there’s something else too… and for some reason, this quote has been rattling around in my head as I think of all this… it’s from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it’s a strange one coming from me… but I’ll explain after the quote:

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out of gumption.

Funny quote to be coming from the lefty public school teacher, but I’m feeling beaten up by the national push for educational standards and No Child Left Behind and teacher-proof curriculum and now a national technology test, and I think I’d hate to see the work of the bloggers be pulled into this kind of national "movement." Again, to quote Pirsig,

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

And maybe I like that seems to be what we’re all doing here. We all seem to be in the process of starting with our own heart and head and hands… and blogging becomes one of the ways we’re working outward from there.

And the more I think about it… for now, I’m o.k. with that.