Random Out-of-Context Paragraph #1

In my fifteen years as a teacher, I always knew I was working in the very heart of education. But after s300-s301, I am now engaged in the scholarship of education. Before my focus went no further than the four walls of my classroom; I was a teacher and only a teacher, and in no formal way was I a writer, commentator, analyst researcher, or philosophizer about teaching. But now I’ve spent a year thinking broadly about education, I’ve talked with researchers and people working on policy, I’ve begun some of my own research, and I’ve started to think about the field contextually. And I feel ready and confident to do so. Maybe I needed fifteen years of teaching and one year of graduate work at Harvard before I could adequately begin to be a scholar in the field. If I had done it any earlier, or without my work at Harvard, I might not have spoken from a place of deep experience and conviction. And nothing is worse than making assertions while simultaneously trying to justify (to yourself and to others) that you are worthy of those assertions. Or to use Edward’s metaphor, Luke left Degobah for the first time too early, before he was ready to be a Jedi. I wanted to be a fully trained “Jedi” educator before I could be a commentator on the field.