Attending the TedXAshburn event on Saturday was an uplifting experience.  I was able to hear fascinating people talk with great passion about their lives and their work.  They were teachers and administrators and mission workers and musicians who all live very different lives yet shared one thing in common: passion.  Most of them had a single sweeping passion that drove them but they also had a passion for life and a determination to live a life that mattered, a life that made a difference to others.

I found myself asking the question: what am I passionate about?  What drives me?  The simple answer is teaching.  I do lots of things as part of my work from organizing conferences to balancing budgets to leading book groups. But as I look across the landscape that is the life of a consultant, it is teaching that inspires me. So, I was glad to hear George Wolfe declare that we are all teachers.  I miss spending time with middle schoolers and having the feeling of influencing a young mind, but I know I am making a difference in the ways my pre-service teachers think about their classrooms and in the ways my graduate students approach the use of technology in their schools.

I have a second passion: learning. This summer, I had the privilege of working with groups of practicing teachers in schools across the country as they try to figure out the best ways to use emerging technologies to meet the needs of their students. I was the teacher as I had the responsibility of organizing our work together but, as with any teaching experience, I also learned so much from the participants just as I learn from the students in my courses. Now, as we continue our work together, I am taking on a different kind of teaching role, that of mentor, as I guide and support them as they work on implementation.

Hence the graphic I was inspired to create as I drafted this entry: we teach, we learn, all in the same time and space. I want to make sure my students know that I am learning from them and with them despite my label as teacher.

In addition to the live speakers, we were treated to two TED videos.  The organizers of Saturday’s event chose Google engineer Matt Cutts’ talk about the 30-day challenge.  Cutts suggests that you think of something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for 30 days:

While Cutts talks about doing something “new,” I’ve decided I just want to do something I already do but would like to do more regularly: write.  Specifically, write blog entries. It is something I think about a lot, even going so far as to draft entries in my head, but I never seem to get them written and published.  Life intervenes by way of emails and phone calls and other distractions.  So, starting today, I am challenging myself to write in this blog every day for the next 30 days. I make this personal challenge public as an added incentive for keeping with it.