Yesterday I had an OL student ask me (in so many words): When is it okay to break the rules? He’d done some reading and found a quote from Gore Vidal who advises writers to learn the rules so you can break them. Is he right?

I said yes and no. Yes, if you are one of my favorite poets: Emily Dickinson. Yes, if you are Cormac McCarthy breaking the rules of punctuation.

If you are a college student, then no, you must not break the rules. Your teachers expect clarity. I’m supposed to be teaching you the rules.

He made me think. I had expected to open my email, answer a few discussion board posts, and move on with my day. But he made me pause. Just like Dickinson does in her dashes. Just like McCarthy does with his character dialogues. Just like this blog. In that moment of pausing, I tend to learn.

But yesterday, there was no pause in sight. So my etmooc time got derailed by my work. No big deal! That’s the spirit of MOOC learning, you get what you can, when you can.

This morning I’ve devoted one hour to reading and thinking before I spend my day reading and thinking (lucky me).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/australianshepherds/5913720524/

I read the first etmooc tweet. There was a link to Stephen Dowes “The Role of the Educator”
so I read the article. That’s all I have time for today. This is my pause.

My main take away is this: what a great list for the many roles of a teacher. My favorite?

“The Agitator — this is the person who creates the itch a person’s education will eventually scratch. The role of the agitator is to create the seed of doubt, the sense of wonder, the feeling of urgency, the cry of outrage. The agitator is sometimes the devil’s advocate, sometimes the revolutionary, sometimes the disruptive agent, and sometimes just somebody who is thinking outside the box. We can all be agitators, but scientists, skeptics, journalists and activists have elevated it into a discipline of its own.”

Throw in a couple of dashes, set it up like a poem, and I’d swear it was Dickinson.