Groan Up

To My Students Growing Old

Age is no better, hardly so well,
qualified for an instructor as youth,
for it has not profited so much as
it has lost'. ... Thoreau.

You all are much older than me and
comfortable even oblivious in the new
millennium: swimming in media web-
net electric company, sending photos
& info instant messenger: intelligence
of a universe dancing on your lap while
I’m still a child of the 50’s: old school
old boy amazed at Dick Tracy’s 2-way
wrist radio 2 decades before CB & truck
convoys.

Smarter too: all the works of humania at
your finger tips; and me: got you sitting
still in classroom seats suppressing your
restless leg syndrome & squeezing your
range-wide attention span reduced to fit
my agenda to say what’s important and
what’s not and test you on it for credit
you got a problem with that?.

Cultural lag & generations.

How to spark the gap. Collaboration?
Me: mid-20^th century youth & innocence
combining with your early New Age
experience & savvy; we might could
make some progress cultivating ideas
in words like local food, like a strawberry
patch run riot with weeds galore. Imagine.

I’ve got anarchists in my classroom
who nevertheless find discomforting
the anarchy I invite: no rules of the
game other than those we generate in
the moment be here now emerging
phenomena rising up among players:
food for thought ubiquitous as snails
& mosquitoes, flies, slugs & worms:
constellation of un-postponed boy o
boy eclipsing the arrow of purpose,
aim, & goal to which we have groan
accustomed.