A Moveable Feast

Sitting in a high school class can afford you a significant amount of time to look at your surroundings. I don’t remember ever considering what kind of thought might have gone into those settings but now that I have an area of my own to “decorate” it’s a different story. Which brings us to the poster.

Unfortunately, I haven’t come across many (any?) posters that quite capture what I’d like the room to say. It doesn’t help that I can’t articulate exactly what that message is. I do know it is somewhere between the overly sunny “Bloom Where You Grow” and the too sarcastic “Potential – Not Everyone Gets To Be An Astronaut When They Grow Up“. There is one poster that sticks with me from my own time in high school however, and I’d like to consider why.

The poster was in an English class in 11th or 12th grade and looked something like this:

“Paris is a moveable feast”. I had no idea what this meant, but for some reason it felt both vaguely mysterious and vaguely positive. A hint at a world that was bigger, more complicated and more interesting than my current milieu. I didn’t give it any deep thought, it was just something I saw daily that stirred some kind of light anticipation of things to come.

Which leads me to ask, in an environment where the whole world seems to be available on just the other side of our screens, how can I cultivate this light wonder and anticipation of a wider world? Yes, I try with partially explained words and concepts. I leave semi-completed projects lying around without comment, but these all feel pretty weak.

I’ll follow-up if I discover any silver bullets, but for now I say, “Cheers to those of you who are successfully preparing a moveable feast for your students every day!”