Our fishbowl
Have I ever mentioned that I worked for years in an aquarium. We were the fish. We had glass walls and an audience of hundreds who came to see what we were doing. This was education in the last century. And I was part of an experiment. We wanted to see if technology had a place in a high school. And so we did our best to spend other people’s money and see whether or not certain ideas would float. Remember it was an aquarium. Not a large one. Roughly 1/4 of a standard classroom which means about the size of a bedroom with no beds. Instead we had counters around 2 walls and three people and two telephones, an oversized laser printer and that was just the basic furnishings. We added and subtracted as the years went by. For some reason our little room with the glass walls seemed to draw every rare fish from our high school pond. We had students there all the time. Not for formal learning. I think we were seen as a shelter against the larger predators that you find in every high school. Students could come to our area and be aware that we were not going to criticize or chastise or make their lives miserable. And it worked for over a decade until the money ran out and we were dispersed to our own areas of the world. But I look back on those years with fondness because we did not have time to relax. Not even finding the time to eat a bowl of ramen noodles which amounted to a 5 minute lunch. The one plus was that if the telephone rang someone else would probably answer it. If you have ever worked in an office because that’s what this was supposed to be, you understand what I mean.
