Just Keep Swimming

What happens when you don't have the chance to open your email until 30 minutes before class, only to find out that you're leading your own class and you better come prepared?  Give yourself a brief moment to panic, quickly brainstorm some topic ideas, and then find out where everyone is meeting.  This is exactly what happened to me tonight after a long day of work and trying to eat somewhere along the way.  Fortunately, I have an amazing group of people who are all in this with me and we managed just fine.

14 of us assembled in our meeting space and quickly typed up our myths for our discussion.  Not one to waste any time, I called us to order by reading through the agenda for the meeting, and then we all agreed to go through in which we all typed our myths.  I have to say that as simplistic and "ordinary" as it may be, I quite like going in order because it makes sense, when so few things do these days.  We quickly discovered that time was dwindling, so Joel proposed that we set a time limit on our talks so we all had the opportunity to discuss our myths.  We all agreed and he became the official timekeeper with his foghorn letting us know that 3 minutes had passed.  Ultimately, we were all able to share, have a brief moment for actual discussion (if not during our 3 minutes, we did so via text), and still managed to debunk some myths that we all have faced at one point or another.

As an elementary student, I attended a private Christian school that used the PACE curriculum.  It was called PACE because students went at their own pace and worked through the workbooks with as little or as much time and help as necessary.  I did a lot of my own self-guided learning in third through sixth grade and am familiar with how it needs to be addressed.  Tonight's class took me back to elementary school where it was up to me to pace myself.  Yes, there were others along for the ride this time, and I wasn't completely alone, but in fact we were directing our own learning.  This tends to be how MALT works in many ways.  Most days I feel like I'm barely staying afloat with all of the demands and am doing much of my learning in a self-guided format.  My peers are here to help me along the way, but I am in charge of my own learning.  When I feel like I might be in danger of drowning, I think of Dory's song from Finding Nemo..."You know what you gotta do when life gets you down?  Just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.What do we do, we swim, swim, swim.  Oh ho ho how I love to swim."