Neelu wears her heart and smarts on her sleeve.
Not too long ago, Anne Lamott wrote a terrific book called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. There are mounds of wisdoms packed into these pages, but the piece that lodged right into my brain is that any project, from folding a paper airplane to painting the Sistine Chapel, starts with a first fold, first brushstroke, first step.
I just got off the phone with Sarwar after an extended chat about education for toddlers. As I hash over our discussion, no clear narrative arc emerges, but rather a Jackson Pollock splatter of ideas, each bubbling and steaming with various degrees of possibilities. And this is how most innovations are launched in our desert classroom.
A chorus of pint-sized voices launches itself out of the peanut-gallery and into the spotlight: we want to learn how to use computers, our students say. So we began discussions about the whys and whats of computer literacy, got a few generous souls to donate some laptops and started one of the most popular pieces of our programming.
The method is that ANY idea is possible as long as you have the ears to listen, the heart to believe and the feet to take the first step. Of course many ideas do some serious shape-shifting en route to realization: The Merasi School Garden, a great dream of Afreen and Akram's, never fully materialized due to poor sunlight and soil quality. But what emerged in place of a flower bed was a plot of land for recess, home to kite construction and flying, chalkboard painting and elaborate paste and coloring projects.
Speaking from the podium at Stanford, Steve Jobs spoke about connecting the dots retrospectively. After we plunge passionately into our idea-realization, Sarwar and I work fiercely to distill replicable patterns and practices from our pilot projects and test runs and thus curricula emerge. But first, we swim in the alphabet soup, with the faith that there are enough vowels and consonants for the right words to rise to the top.
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