I used to tell my students
That it wasn’t about the papers they turned in
The grades spread out across a digital grid
The products, the GPAs.
I would tell them
Education is about
What’s left after you take away the papers
And grades
Your brain should be rewired to
To be smarter
To know more
To think better
yet now I regret that my metaphor
Was technological
Implying that the human mind
Is a machine
Now I’d like to find
A more organic metaphor
To explain how learning changes and expands the mind
A spider web with more and more threads
Of connection catching new things
A lake with many streams
Running into it from different sources
A tree growing ever deeper roots
While above the limbs and branches and twigs
Grow upwards and outwards
Crisscrossing and interconnecting
Branches of knowledge indeed
Or a bird’s nest gathering twigs and sticks
And weaving them together into a place to live in
Rewiring implies
Upgrading to better chips and semiconductors
More memory
More RAM
Faster processing
More efficiency
More transactions
But webs and lakes and trees and nests
Are not efficient
They grow slowly
Deliberately
Transformationally
At the pace of wisdom