Most graciously, Paul bought me dinner at Van Beeren tonight. Because it is one of those deeply reliable, stoically beautiful cafes that lead you to move to Amsterdam, I suggested we meet there. I’ve taken a few of you there too. The long bar (at which we sat), weathered tables, candles from a few days ago, and chandeliers from 1925 all help make it super “gezellig,” a word always translated as “cozy” but which, in this case, misses what locals (unintentionally) suggest when they call something, “very okay.” No shine, no pretense, just a better-than-purgatory default
An expert in curriculum, a polyglot, and the shepherd of a whole flock of scholars, Paul has lots of qualities as an educator I do not. But we share a taste for the impractical and tonight shared old-man yucks about how no one will do what we see as entirely obvious. He proposed one of those two-by-two matrices, the one that has "Important” on the X axis and “Urgent” on the Y but replaced with “Impossible” and “Dreamy” instead. Quadrants of the Quixotic.
Schools should give teachers more time to be entrepreneurs, we said. Students should be addressing real, local problems, we said. Everyone teaching the same handful of subjects so as to gain admission into Harvard is nuts, we said.
“Turn education over to teachers and kids, not syllabi and apparatus,” Paul said.
“Very, O.K.,” I said.