Think of asking questions. How often in a day do we hear, “does anyone have any questions?”. The answer is so obviously “yes”, and yet the response if so often silence. Last week I walked the waterworks of a community development with students – we were following how the water in all its wonderful utility would travel from the town’s water tower to the homes and back to the water table. It was fascinating. I asked so many questions. A student wandered up to me at the end of the tour and said, “You ask a lot of questions.” I’m not sure that he knew if he meant it as a slight or not.

Here’s the thing about questions: it is weird to ask them because they come with the vulnerability of acknowledging fascinations and/or things you don’t know. Both vulnerabilities are publicly thought of as “weird”. Passion, fascination, imagination, joy, creativity, emotion, beautiful qualities – maybe the most beautiful – that we are taught, that’s right taught, to keep under wraps.

Which brings me to chapter 2 of our podcasts sharing the story of the Specialist Program at Russell High School. As Kathleen Rios explains, we need to embrace our weird as an example for our students that they can embrace their own version of weird. Because weird is where our identities thrive. What makes me and my contributions unique? The ways in which I am uniquely weird. It’s where I discover that “I” can do something, and the space where “I” share my ideas with the world.

This is the definition of the Specialist Program: a place to amplify your weird to serve the world beyond school with ideas only you can share. This is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary: the belief that bringing your whole, unfiltered self is not only of benefit to you, but the entire world and every human being that comes into contact with you. This is, as I understand it, Edward Clapp’s notion of the “biography of an idea”. Only you can add the ingredient to an idea that is the product of all of us in the way that you add it. Large or small, your unique piece is essential to the development of the idea itself.

And so the Specialist Program asks students, what do you want to learn, and what do you want to do with it. And then...? You learn it. And you do something with it. And you bring it to an audience. You make paper because you can, and in so doing you learn about the environment, and you plant trees in your community from the revenue you grow and the trees that you save. You collect materials and make sensory blankets because you can, and because the act of zipping and unzipping, buttoning and unbuttoning, and being in touch with different fabrics helps us know we are alive. And so, your learning – about quilting – becomes a lifeline to someone who needs to be warmed by connection. You take from your closet clothes that become catalysts for clothes that you make. It’s a contemporary return to a time when the clothes that you wore were made by someone you knew who made them: what began as a need for a shirt moved to a catalogue for a design, to a fabric for the design, to the shirt that you wore to school. These are all arts that are relevant, are alive, and in learning them we learn about who we are and who we can be.

There is something to the notion of “I am...” It is a step in the process of what Biesta calls becoming an “‘I’ in the world”. I am not a discipline or a subject. However, I carry disciplines with me as I navigate the world. It is here, in my individual weirdness, that I apply my disciplinary thinking in ways that only I can. In this quilt of conversation we talk with Kathleen Rios and hear from the students of Thrifty Ts about the becoming of a self.

I am.