I chose this tumbleweed as an object to use to explore metaphors of teaching and learning. It’s mounted to a wall above a window in our house. I collected it by the side of the road in southeastern Oregon during my last sabbatical, and drove it all the way back to New Hampshire in the back of my CR-V. I spray painted it white. There’s also a smaller one I spray painted red. I cannot fully explain the compulsion to spray paint them, but I’m glad I did. It was hard, but they look cool. They are the Very Prickly Kind of tumbleweed — others aren’t as feisty. (There are many kinds of tumbleweed; many plants that do this kind of tumbling.) A tumbleweed is a diaspore, which travels to spread its seeds! Like, it was designed to dry up, to be ripped from the ground by the wind, and to tumble. To tumble as a means of spreading its seeds far and wide. I just love that. I like that the tumbleweed is, in the plant kingdom, a member of the “diaspora.” I like to think of learning and teaching as associated with traveling/tumbling. This particular kind of travel, though, is kind of chaotic. Like, the tumbleweed doesn’t get to decide where it tumbles, the wind decides. What is the wind in this metaphor? Maybe the wind is . . . the surprise? The improvisational? The variable? Those words represent parts of teaching and learning that feel very important to me. The wind is predictable to a degree — the tumbleweed is designed to anticipate the wind. With no wind, there will be no tumbling, and therefore no propagation. I’m also interested in what a nuisance tumbleweeds can be — the Wikipedia page for “tumbleweed” has some great examples of this. I am interested, in teaching and learning, in unintended consequences, in frictions between (and overlaps among) what we were “supposed” to learn, what we “wanted” or “planned” to learn, and what we actually learn. I like how unruly tumbleweeds are. How hard to handle they can be. Surprisingly difficult to spray-paint as well!