According to a recent article in the , "Native American elders...urge that no decision should be made or action taken without considering how it will affect the coming seven generations." Unfortunately we no longer are dealing with generation Y, we are dealing with generation Y wait? My students think of films that came out five years ago as old whereas I grew up watching Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Tony Curtis films. I know not only who Ingrid Bergman is (Notorious is one of my favorite films) but who Ingmar Bergman is. My students are like five year olds, they have no concept of past or future only this present here and now. They have a very limited conceptualization of consequence. They have not yet accepted that one can not have everything, but there must be some sort of trade off. Last year when I asked my student about their career goals they were surprisingly naive. Many of the female students aimed for careers in politics, but also wanted to have children and be involved mothers. They don't understand that these women who are high ranking politicl officials can not spend that much time with their children. Something has to be sacrificed. That is the way of all decisions, something is going to be cut, some item or person or goal or drem must be put up on the block.

Today I was watching La Strada, a Fellini film. "The Fool" in the film, played by Richard Basehart (for those people who loved MST3K, as I did, you will remember that Gypsy loved Richard Basehart) baehart's character, the Fool, espouses a theory that everything has a purpose, has a use. This is how I view learning. I spent two hours in the computer lab this frieday working on some minor reformatting on the template of this blog: two hours to figure out this little thing, but I thought it was worth it. Most of kids don't have that kind of patience. But I figure that everything is worth learning. Richard Basehart's character would agree. He tells the female lead, Gelsomina, that even a pebble has a purpose in the universe. Of course, he talks her into stayed with her abusive husband ("If you don't stick with him, who will?" He asks. He further convinces her by saying "He is like a dog who wants to talk, but can only bark.") In the end, the Fool is murdered by Gelsomina's husband, and Gelsomina, driven to madness by the murder, is abandoned by her husband and eventually dies. Another uplifting film by Fellini.