polka dot suitcase

In my ongoing 2009 ambition to join the 21st century, I finally started Twittering. Tweeting? Uh, still got a lot to learn. Anyhoo, when you sign on, the Twitter Powers That Be suggest a bunch of people to stalk. Er, "follow." And there’s LeVar Burton, aka Geordi from Star Trek. Sure, I’ll follow Geordi. Click.

So, LeVar tweets about something to his almost 200,000 followers (not even kidding). It was funny, so I tweeted ‘im back. Oooh, I’m big time now! And I’m waiting by the tweeterphone for him to respond. But of course, Geordi’s kinda busy, his profile says, what with the acting, producing, and educating… Wait, wha–? LeVar’s an educator?

So that started a chain reaction in my brain as I went off to polish my polka dots. It went like this (click to actually read it):

According to my calculations, the George Lucas Foundation trumps Reading Rainbow in terms of educational clout (totally setting aside the old Star Wars/Star Trek which-is-better battle). But then again, when you consider the (incomplete) list of alternate "educators" on the bottom left, there are many, many unconventional educators.

So, LeVar’s stake on the "educator" title could be valid. If your pets can educate you — and you realize I’m not suggesting your guppy instructs you in the way your continuing education instructor does on Thursday nights — then why not a guy from Star Trek?

Which brings me in close enough approximation to my point: Education isn’t just in the classrooms. But you knew that. Here’s something: Imagination guides education. Not just the artsy-fartsy stuff, either. You start with imagination (scientists like to call it hypothesis, whatev) and build from there. Math: Someone had to figure out the magic of pi. Ah, magic. In math. Now we’re getting polka-dotted. Lifelong education, learning and discovering down every path. And it’s fun, too. Forget the boring school drills and worksheets…ack! Life is bulging with all these cool little ways to learn while you play.

Over at the TED conference, Sir Ken Robinson had this to say about how schools kill creativity.

Space wasn’t the final frontier. That would be the big gray matter blobs sitting inside our skulls. What’s in there? Think I’ll rummage around in my polka dot suitcase and find out. So tweet that, Geordi.