one week away from my teaching degree.

one week away from a return to the world of freelancing/scrambling.

my book of children's poetry is coming along brilliantly (that's 3 poems, to be exact), but i do love them.

my agent seems confident that i'll be writing on a kids show/animation this summer. i just want to make money and begin repaying my debts, so to be sure i can do that, i've begun playing the lottery :)

when i consider what it means to educate someone, i frequently remember my own learning processes as a child. the responsibility is on the educator to motivate the student and to present to the student ideas, things, facts, real-ia, to stimulate the mind. to present ascending ropes to students that they are expected/required to climb, and then try to find a myriad of ways to get students interested enough to eventually climb on their own, to love climbing.

worst case scenario is having to push the kid lightly up onto the rope and nudge him when needed, best case is having them find a zillion new ways to do it that you've never seen, so that next year you have even more ways to try to teach kids to climb. some kids hate climbing.

This makes me as interested in the person as i am in their academic pursuits and abilities. i think the person, their core, influences the mind into action.

a person who is interested in something, academic or not, will learn as much as they can about it. people who are open to new ideas and things are more apt to be willing to learn about new ideas and things. by presenting as much that is new as possible to people, we open their minds to education, understanding.

that is why toronto is a great city. we are exposed to so much. we are all familiar with the racial diversity, ethic, and class. we eat food from all cultures, learn new delicacies, watch new films, see more. cities are a model for how a fractured humanity can learn to live together. if toronto grew to 300,000,000, and then those people took those ideologies picked up here back to their home countries, are unity would spread like a disease, like laughter in a theatre, like 'ahhhs' at fireworks.

one more week.