Less than perfect

By S Zillayali, CC BY-SA 3.0 

We've forgotten how to be human--how else explain the maker space fetishism in our schools?

A 3D printer makes a blob of plastic, converting a child's imagination into something tangible, but this has always been possible if one can tolerate less than professional edges.

Folks post pictures of meals they've made on Facebook, as though feeding ourselves is some art form or Herculean feat--"Look at what I did!"

And meanwhile I am expected to "prepare" children for the 21st century, ignoring a biological being that has evolved as part of an intricate web for over 3 billion years, treating the latest turn of the century as some feat of numerology.

The story is the same has it has been for thousands upon thousands of years. We eat, we breathe, we drink, we reproduce, we love, we live, we die.

Grown by one of my lambs, classroom windowsill

We used to do this for ourselves, in the broad sense of community, for each other, with each other.
Most of us still do, despite the constant drumbeat of professionalism, of perfection, of systemic standards so that the pieces of made by me fits the pieces made by a stranger a continent away.

I'm OK with sharing my less than perfect life with my less than perfect neighbors chatting over less than perfect fence about things that have nothing to do with the perfect world we pretend matters.

I cannot imagine being a kid today....