I’m still on a blogging vacation, buried in new work, new systems, adjusting to office work and just enjoying my family.  I got stuck, in a writerly sense, as happens from time to time, and needed the extra time away from the blog.  I’ll be back soon, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share this passage, very well written, from today’s aggregator.  Bruce is a thoughtful teacher and an excellent writer.  Today he captured a great deal of my thinking of late.  Here goes:

As I think about what the new school year is going to be like, and try
to prepare myself for starting over with new students, and a dizzying
array of new tech tools, my concern is to try to find a balance between
the traditions that I still honor—as for example, the reading of books
and the slow, thoughtful appreciative engagement with the real
world—and the opportunity for innovation, which may very well be
technology-enhanced. I don’t want to let go of what has always worked,
and I don’t want to give short shrift to what might be even better.

The post ends this way:

If we are, as Birkerts suggests, "a society that has begun to come
loost (sic) from its textual moorings," should our role as educators be to
try get the ship back into safe harbor and re-tie the hawsers, or to
catch the rising tide and head out to open sea?

Those are just a
few of the questions that are moving through the back of my brain as I
doze on my metaphorical blanket under the seductive Hawaiian sun. No
worries: I don’t have to come up with the answers for at least another
two weeks.

    The stuff in the middle is the best part.