"Traveling Through The Dark" was posted by Darren Kuropatwa on October 23, 2008 of a presentation by the fifth grade teacher Steven Kimmi. Kimmi's presentation uses William Stafford's poem "Traveling Through The Dark" and metaphorically links it to integrating technology in the classroom. The story of the poem is of a man that comes across a dead pregnant doe hit on the road and the fawn inside her still being alive. The man struggles with two decisions: to make the easy choice and just push the doe's body off the edge of a cliff, or the difficult choice to save the fawn from death and deliver it so that it might live on. Kimmi uses this poem to illustrate that as a teacher it is hard to make the hard decision in any situation, especially when it comes to the education of the next generation. The theme of the blog is choosing the path to take in the darkness. The darkness represents the unknown, which for some teachers would be the world of technology. Kimmi says how most teachers choose the easy path because it is comfortable to them. However, according to Kimmi, to be a good teacher one must take the path that is foreign to us so that we might learn more and be able to integrate it into the classroom. Kimmi chose this path to begin a journey for himself in learning more about technology so that he could better understand the information and to help his students in learning more too. By learning more about technology a teacher can better integrate it into the classroom so that his or her students could obtain a better knowledge of the technology and its uses. Before this integration, however, teachers must be sure to learn the information thoroughly so that they may teach it to the best of their ability. This choice of path is the darkness that is unknown and scary to teachers. By reaching into the darkness a ray of hope is illuminated onto the future paths that are taken.
This is the link to the presentation by Steven Kimmi:
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=276
