UDUTU and "Green Beer"

This weekend I am rubbing noses with UDUTU amidst St. Patrick's Day weekend! As St. Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday -- not your typical "drinking" day, as Monday follows Sunday -- it seems it will be a three-day celebration. In retrospect, it arguably started last weekend, as one town held its St. Patrick's Day parade and many patrons in the establishment I work in on weekends were garbed in green. For me, however, the holiday means I'm saddled with an added day of work -- this Sunday, a day normally allocated to my grad work! A separate distraction this week has been finding out the new evaluation criteria for, get this, Language Arts and mathematics teachers, that will be tied to student performance and growth, a topic bandied about for some time. I received a link to this post, which, mind you, is SATIRE, about a teacher suing parents for the poor performance of their child. And I just had to smile as I reflected back to the simpler days of time in college reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal," another jewel of satire whose meaning, alas, was widely missed by the readers of his day. (It takes place in Ireland, so it's an Irish theme this week's post.) Hopefully, these changes taking place in evaluation reform will be far more bark than bite! In my last post, I mentioned the poem "A Birth" by James Dickey, and I find now that I am trying to turn the vision of my e-Learning topic and storyboard into an actual module, the meaning of the poem is all-too-fitting. To paraphrase the poem, the narrator creates a pasture, only to find a horse in it. The idea, I think, is that an idea comes to mind; however, the initial idea morphs into something else, something more complex and unique. Further, he cannot control the horse, the fence posts fail to hold. Such suggests how the creative process is limited by the realities of the world. A parent creates new life in the birth of a child, and yet, that child is a life unique and independent of the parent - or author- who created it. Back to UDUTU - I find that many of the ideas I have envisioned may be impractical or even impossible to execute, so my new philosophy is to work through UDUTU as one does a riptide: let it take you out and away and wherever it will, and, all the while, keep your head above water, swim parallel to the shore (your desired learning outcome), and make it safely back to shore whatever way you can. Let the journey begin!