With the passing of my 25th college reunion this year, I have been thinking a lot about how those four years permanently altered my life. I still have vivid memories of sitting in a large auditorium listening to Professor Rockefeller amaze my friends and me with his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Western philosophy, frantically scribbling down every word I could catch, knowing that my friends and I would meet later to fill in the gaps in each other's notes. It was a heady experience, being exposed to some of the greatest minds in history by someone who clearly had an extraordinary intellect himself. And yet, looking back on the course now, I can recall only three things: the excitement I felt as I followed along, the connections I felt with my friends as we worked to get each other through the course, and Plato's concept of form as the unknowable ideal. Should I be frustrated that so much of what I learned was so transitory, or delighted at the depth of the friendships I achieved and the internalization of a concept that helps guide my life to this day? What did I - really - learn in this course?

Recently, on the MiddleTalk listserv, my friend Ellen Berg posed a similar question: "What is REAL learning?" You ask that kind of question of several hundred teachers, you better expect to get flooded with responses, and indeed my inbox began to light up with idea after idea, such as the following:

Learning that lasts, that can be recalled and used when necessary, both now and through adulthood.
- Anne Van Meter

Real learning comes from when students are provided the support, space, and time to develop ideas of HOW to think and get to their OWN truth instead of WHAT to think. I liked this quote from Thomas Payzant (Boston Schools) "The purpose of education is to know what to do when you don't know."
- Keith Mack

Real learning is sustained, allowing the learner to re-access it when needed. It is fluid, changing as the learner learns more, experiences more, and needs more information about that topic. Real learning lasts.
- Cossondra George

You'll notice that  these definitions, taken together, speak to the paradoxical nature of true learning as being both transitory and permanent - a change is accomplished and one can never go back, but a fluidity is implied that suggests that further change may lie ahead. Our knowledge and our beliefs are continually evolving and being shaped as we go through life. The seventh graders, in a discussion about fearing vs. exploring the past, present and future, caught a sense of the inexorable flow that is life, that is learning at its best, when one of them said "But technically there is no future, because once you get there it's the present - and then it becomes the past." Some were quick to agree, others equally quick to disagree - "But if you live only in the present, you'll never have a sense of what's possible in the future," one student observed. Learning, then, is not only both transitory and permanent, it is also intensely personal, as Keith Mack observed above.

In our meeting back on Fall Family Weekend, "Continued love of learning" was listed by parents as the second-highest priority to "Happiness" for your daughters. Among the best ways to promote a continued love of learning are to ensure the learning is truly relevant to each student, and to incorporate simultaneously the sum total of our past and a wealth of possibilities for the future into a vivid present. When we can accomplish that, so much is possible!

With recent memories of the occasion of the first snow (if not the first snowstorm) of the year; of the seventh grade homeroom flocked to the window, doing happy dancing laps around the table, or just smiling warmly at the world; of my advisory group asking if they could cut out paper snowflakes and decorate the room (they could!), I am well aware that children know what is important and when they are fully engaged. Thus, I wish to close with a poem submitted by Jacquie Leighton in response to Ellen Berg's question about real learning:

Undivided Attention

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers,
tied up with canvas straps - like classical music's
birthday gift to the insane -
is gently nudged without its legs
out an eight-floor window on 62nd street.

It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers' crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares
and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last
note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat,
the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over, and
I'm trying to teach math in the building across the street.

Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by
long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks
or come through everything, even air.
Like snow.

See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window
as if snow were more interesting than math,
which, of course, it is.

So please.

Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers' crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.

Let me teach like the first snow, falling.

- Taylor Mali