Imagine?????????

Imagine you are me. You have just returned from Kenya where you hosted a group of engineering students (Engineers for a Sustainable World). One of them asked on the trip if I'd ever been thrown in jail. I told them about the time I got arrested for loitering in Denver while traveling on the bus to Washington as part of the Martin Luther King Peace trip. Are you still imagining you are me? Can you imagine how I feel about tomorrow's inaugeration? Watching those Harvey Mudd College students in Kenya, watching the Kenyan students from Clay International School--as cynical as I am, it fills me with hope. I never imagined I'd be starting a school in Africa. I never imagined we'd have a black President. If I didn't imagine these things, what else might be possible? How's your imagination working?
Of course, inspirational as all this is, those of you at Goddard in the SBC program know it's packet time. We're on the home stretch for this semester and I am personally on the home stretch for finishing the program. Ann Driscoll asked what suggestions I might have for improving the program. Natually, like you, I think the program is pretty awesome as it is, but living in this new world of possibilities we never dreamed of, I gave thought to how we might make "progressive education" even more progressive.
As I've said more than once, I believe we need to keep our program academically rigorous. Somebody says "progressive" and somebody else thinks it's just another way of saying "slacker." And maybe some of you really have a better handle than I have on how to do the Goddard thing in a more meaningful way. For my thirty cents (and we all know it was quite a bit more) I'd like to change the idea of "study plan" to "inquiry." I wish I'd started every semester with a question. In my case, looking at fundraising, the first semester's question would have been, "Why do people give money to non-profit organizations?" Each of you have your own questions, or maybe you didn't, and then your question might have been "What does 'sustainability' really mean? or social entreprenuership? or whatever you had on your mind. The "study plan" then might look more like, first I'm going to do a literature seach and describe what I found. Then I'm going to do a little field research and describe it. Then I'm going to write my conclusions and come up with the next logical question.
Okay, it's just my idea. Hopefully you have some ideas of your own. And by the way, I don't think anybody in the SBC program would find accreditation issues or rigor issues in approaching it this way. I just never thought about it that way. Now as I near the conclusion, I wish I had. And I'm only one student. I hope you have some thoughts of your own and if you are reading this, you take them time to post them. Thanks.