Seeking Balance in a Skewed Lifestyle

Farmers MarketBrenda and I just got back from the Raleigh Farmer’s Market.  I was surprised at how busy they were.  We actually had to leave some stalls and come back later because of the demand —  mostly for peaches.  Most stalls were a repeat of tomatoes, field peas, young potatoes, okra, and just about every variety of squash and eggplant imaginable.

The shear volume and variety of produce and locally made nick-nack merchandise indicated enormous work and ingenuity, and the range of colors were so pleasing to the eye.   It was humbling?

Do these folks and their children need to be able to search and evaluate Net-based information?  Do they need to be able to produce video, publish on the web, or analyze tabular data from the web?  Well, the answer is yes.  However, it isn’t their whole world.  It’s a hammer and a saw — a hoe and a rake. 

I’m an evangelist!  As such, I’m warped.  I have a skewed perspective — and I appreciate that.  I simply hope to be able to recognize opportunities for balance and to seize on them.  Perhaps the peach cobbler Brenda’s making right now will be one of those opportunities 🙂

2 thoughts on “Seeking Balance in a Skewed Lifestyle”

  1. Dave, I’ve been thinking along similar lines this morning but in a very different context. I’ve been watching astronaut Clay Anderson perform his very first spacewalk to continue the construction of the ISS. I feel connected with Clay because he is working with us in our online, collaborative project, ISS07, http://iss07.yesican-science.ca. Over the course of more than 6 hours, Clay performed procedures that had been carefully scripted, tested, re-scripted, re-tested and then rehearsed and rehearsed. I was able to capture some beautiful footage of Clay, stretched out from a foot restraint at the end of the Canadarm2 with the South Pacific Ocean as the backdrop. Clay’s task was to jettison a piece of no-longer-needed equipment so it would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. I heard Clay checking his orientation with his crew members and ground control before starting the movement that would launch the unwanted equipment. “Can I confirm that I am leaning back?”, he asked. “Yes”, came the reply, “Just do it like you practiced; take it slow and do it the way you’ve practiced…” As you felt humbled by the work, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the farmers and merchants plying their trade, I too felt humbled by the hard work, dedication, and skill of this astronaut. Did he hone these skills through the use of any of the Web2.0 tools we know are “must-haves” for our classrooms? No, he didn’t. He daily practiced the same tasks over and over, underwater, using a simulator and so on until he gained that sense of mastery, just as those farmers produced a masterpiece of local produce. In our calls for school reform, and there must be reform, we must be careful to also accommodate the physical, practical and aesthetic skills that can best be developed through the use of physical tools, and practice, sometimes solitary.

  2. Hey Dave, been there, done that. My in-laws live in Chester, SC, and for a while they had a farm. My husband an I did the working in the garden, and got up early (5 am) on Tuesdays and Saturdays to sell produce from the garden on market days. While the camaraderie was priceless, the labor was anything but. It was such a relief to turn it all under come October every year. But it was so great to eat that fresh Carolina peach in July and nothing beats a home grown tomato!! Just reminiscing makes me hungry for these things. But back to the topic at hand–at the market there was a lot of conversations b/w the sellers of what was growing, what was working in their gardens, how they grew certain things, and so on. So the key to the success of even an open air market is the ability to NETWORK. Maybe there is a place for social networking with this group afterall!

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