There was one summer day in 2007 when I thought I saw my friend’s ghost twice in the same hour. I was annoyed rather than sad, and I uttered (but was immediately horrified with) the words, “Damn you, Carter” Then I figured that every poem-writer should be allowed at least one death/eulogy poem, so I meted out mine:
Carter, Dead
At times I think I see your shade Out corners of my study keeping dusty with ambition I keep on lights past midnight Having only the void and no vision
In several ways, I want to be like Chris Lott when I grow up. I don’t know him terribly well–I think we sat at the same dinner table at WCET in 2006, and we banter and blather back in forth via blogs and Twitter–but he never fails to make a good impression.
Seemingly out of the blue Chris opened up another window into his mind, using a Whitman quote as a clue to explain his “inconsistencies”. Using recent examples of how he’s changed his mind on perceptions or aspects of his world view, Chris justifies his so-called inconsistencies by implying that alternating positions, and the fact that people change their mind, can be reasonably explained.
But no explanation is needed. What I think Chris knows but would be naturally loathe to admit is that he is able to practice what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the test of first-rate intelligence”:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Too often “…and still retain the
ability to function” is left off this quote but I daresay it is a critical component of Fitzgerald’s argument. At the risk of sounding like a Chris Lott groupie, I’ve seen Chris do this, even alternately arguing different sides of the same issue while still being grounded enough in reality to get the job done. So many “big-thinkers” in ed tech get either too attached to one side of an argument, or are so caught up in the argument itself that they fail to move anything forward.
This laudatory exercise was unexpected, but that’s alright. What I really want to answer is Chris’s question, what have you changed your mind about?
Here’s are two:
Being elite and
critical is not as important as being encouraging and kind. This is a pretty damning statement, but I daresay anyone who knows me understands that a certain degree of elitism is just part of my personality.
This is
not to say that I no longer believe in the power of the critical eye,
or the struggle for excellence, afronting relativism, it’s just that
I’ve realized–and this is pretty recently–that Most Normal People Are Doing Their Best, and if they are
at all of like me (despite the hardened facade I often put forth to
resist weaker emotions), they want to hear the positive more often than
the negative, they deserve to be applauded when they earn applause, and
that should be louder than the boos when they deserve booing.
Second,
