“Dream a little – no, dream a lot.”

This is healthy.

“…a prompt to write about what it’s been like to reflect and write about teaching, but if that doesn’t move you, how about imagining the future of learning? What is your dream teaching situation, and how might you get there? What do you want to do but it seems impossible? Dream a little – no, dream a lot.” 

Our only job should be answering this question, “What is your dream teaching situation, and how might you get there?” We should spend a lot of time making whatever that is, happen for ourselves.

The only thing administrators should ever say to faculty is, “How can I help you” or, “What do you want to do but it seems impossible? Let me help you get there.”

And “Dream a little – no, dream a lot.”

I say “Yes” to that.

I’ve had visions and dreams. Some I have been able to make happen, many not. I remember teaching Photoshop classes and we’d sit in a room from 6 to 9 or so on Wednesday evenings and click the mouse, tell stories, looks and critique the art created. We’d share weekly epiphanies each week. But my favorite moments were meeting students in Jerome each semester and having a coffee and walking around talking about life. Those were my favorite times. Maybe not for the students, but they liked the coffee. The town. And a lot of questions were dreamt up. Life was good.

As a high school English teacher, I recall the days of wondering what we could do in beautiful places and still get some “credit” for the work. Here is how I described one of those moments and stuff like this was the result.

“This course was born in a tired conversation near Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. A few students and I had been talking about hiking in other locations and I told them I had spent three weeks in the Redwoods and some time in Yosemite. Of course, they wanted to go there too.”

I spent a lot of time dreaming. And doing dreams. I am lucky.

These days, working with faculty at a university, my days are often more made of digital stuff than they are of granite or blue sky. It ok, but my dreams are not usually indie anything. Inside an LMS that is… Much like the world, the best stuff ain’t in the classrooms or Canvas. It’s up there in Jerome, or Yosemite, or on WordPress, or a YouTube channel. Even in the simplest form of my work, the container we had to demonstrate our teams’ work was in some old skool CMS the college had. We had to buy the telswebletter.com to do what we knew the internet could actually do for us, our faculty. We dreamt up our dream. We are still dreaming it 🙂