When I started this course, my goals were mostly based around seeing another way of providing professional development and setting up a (mostly) virtual community, getting to know people outside my small bucket, and engaging with content as a student to help pick up my own tips and tricks for teaching. A week in and a lot has changed. I knew that I had been getting progressively dis-spirited and de-motivated about working in education, but I hadn’t realized quite how much I wasn’t able to… well, care.

I used to care in a public way about a lot of different things and people and issues, but increasingly I’ve found myself unable to muster the gumption. I do care for people (and issues and things and definitely dogs) but what I care about and the way I want to show that care has changed, and I didn’t realize quite how much I was struggling with defining what that means for my values and my interactions with the people around me. It’s kind of baffling how basic and essential the idea of care is and how little I’ve thought about it personally, professionally, and systemically.

So I’m not sure about goals, but the questions I would like to continue considering next week are:

• What does care mean to me right now, and what ideas can I let go of that no longer fit with my understanding of care, kindness, or myself?
• Which ways of caring drain me, and which give me energy and hope?
• What is right about the kind of care that I’m showing right now, and what did I label as care but is actually cruel?
• What does it mean to care systemically and for the whole (e.g. democracy, at an institution, in a community)?
• What does care mean for teaching adult learners? How is this different (or the same) for college students?
• Why not choose kindness? Why not choose trust? What does this look like in a day, a year, and a life?