(a talk given to the faculty at our May 20 orientation meeting and conference)

There is a vine called the banana poka, indigenous to the Amazon, that has found its way to the Hawaiian islands. It is particularly fast-growing and rapacious, and can devastate entire forests in no time at all. When I'm at home in Maui, one of my jobs at my brother's ecological campsite is to tear down new outbreaks of this particular vine.

Sometimes a trail is just a trail, a tree just a tree, a vine nothing more than a vine. But once in a while they can be metaphors, too. All you need is a Zenish emptiness of mind as you work on clearing a trail or building a treehouse, or as you pull down choking vines for hours on end. And at some point while doing these things for a while, like you’re meditating almost, that blessed lightbulb-flickering-on moment suddenly happens and clarity dawns. A few weeks ago, I was doing those things, back home in Upcountry Maui.

As I worked at the campsite not long ago, I saw the metaphors as clearly as I could see the volcano’s peak on a typically cloudless day on the flanks of Haleakala. For me, it was ATDP all over again: blazing a trail through the oftentimes thorny thickets of the educational establishment, planting trees of knowledge, nurturing the saplings that come here to Berkeley summer after summer, making sense of the vast and intricate networks of schooling and learning that connect us all together in many ways, like creeping vines that are both harmful and helpful.

These days, one of the vines that threatens to overwhelm us is the mother of all networks herself, the global Internet. School administrators, teachers, parents, politicians, policy-makers, seemingly everyone nowadays insists that schools and classrooms have to be wired in order to provide students with access to this amazing tool and learning resource. This is fine, actually. I’m not knocking the basic idea. It’s just that the rush to be wired is just that... rushed, disorganized, unequal, and on the whole not very well thought-through. Throwing money and dumping category-5 wiring at schools will not solve certain intractable problems and, in fact, can exacerbate them. I’m sure many of you here can attest to this much better than I can, as you are on the receiving end of the various endeavors and initiatives to bring schools and classrooms online. Those schools and school districts that have been lucky enough to have the money and expertise to put the networking stuff in place aren’t necessarily putting the technology to good use—as we at ATDP can attest to, in some abortive collaborative efforts that UC Berkeley has had with the San Francisco Unified School District over the last decade. And of course, many schools (particularly in inner city and rural areas) still don’t even have the most basic technological infrastructure and are made to feel somehow deprived and left behind. As if books, pencils, paper, and imagination itself, have gone out of style and are no longer useful.

And meanwhile, what’s happening with the students themselves? Many, like the typical ATDP student, are way way ahead of the technology curve, ahead of their parents and teachers, learning the digital magic partly on their own but mostly through their online communities. And these communities are, for the most part, surprisingly opaque and often outright impenetrable to adults. For those of you who have taken the time to investigate, you know that there’s an incredibly dense virtual world out there that students dive into, as soon as that last schoolbell rings for the day. It’s a world of learning and play that, in significant ways is more dynamic than a classroom will ever be. Something literally comes alive when kids log on in droves to this world at around mid-afternoon. If only they poured a fraction of the creativity and desire that they devote to the online world to that of the real-world classroom... teachers everywhere would be overwhelmed. But overjoyed too, since the attention and focus on learning in any given academic domain would be intense and undiluted.

But instead of that utopian classroom state, we get something like the immense popularity among schoolkids of the comedian and actor Adam Sandler’s anti-teacher and anti-school comedy spiels. My personal sampling of students may be vanishingly small, but it’s representative enough and I trust their unvarnished reportage from the field: so I know that copies of these particular monologues of Sandler’s are all over the place -- in pirate CDs, but mostly in the form of MP3s. Just log on using Napster and do this query: in the Artist field, type "Sandler" and in the Title field, type the word “beating” ... and you’ll get scores if not hundreds of copies of the following atrocities: “The beating of a high school janitor.” “The beating of a high school science teacher.” “The beating of a high school Spanish teacher.”

At this point you might well be asking, what does this all have to do with mentoring? And what happened to the vine metaphor?

Well, not all vines are bad, like the banana poka. The Adam Sandler stuff, though, is a great example of a bad vine. I honestly admit to chuckling at the Sandler stuff the first time I heard them, but was then appalled at my reaction. It’s obvious that these spiteful monologues are popular because they reflect a very real, very negative attitude that many students -- yes even ATDP-type kids -- have towards many of us teachers. Now, this isn’t exactly news. But it’s certainly bothersome that such attitudes still persist, to be given voice in popular culture and rampantly (not to mention illegally) dispersed via the Internet.

But, how about the good vines? At the risk of gratuitous self-congratulation, the ATDP is an example of a very good vine. So, we've gathered you all here this morning in part so you can listen to us speechify. I have no illusions that what any of us might say here today will be deathless and life-shakingly profound. But I have just enough hope that, if you leave today with no memory of what you’ve heard except for one thing, that you remember this quaint, and seemingly naive, notion: that ATDP is a good vine, one that we must nurture so it can grow and spread. In case you haven’t noticed, ATDP is a network. Not least in its Internet component, which has allowed many students over the years to keep in touch with each other and with their mentors, and importantly to have a focal, common point of discourse and identity.

So, who are these students anyway?

Over the last decade, I’ve been able to keep in close touch with former students and mentees, and at bottom it's because of nothing more complicated and mysterious than the good vine of the e-mail and instant messaging components of the worldwide web. Let me tell you about two of them in particular.

Demetrius Bell and Lawrence Smith, two African-American kids from inner city San Francisco attended ATDP in the early 90s as students, then TAs in my classes. Even though I saw them mostly during the summer, we kept in close touch throughout their schoolyear, keeping the connection alive thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet in their lives and in mine. They and I were hip to the Net long before it became fashionable, and long before it began growing in leaps and bounds, in the latter half of the 90s.

Demetrius started out with visions of pulling a Bill Gates, so he dropped out after his freshman year at San Jose State University to join The Learning Company, an established educational software company as a programmer and educational software game designer. You’ve seen his stuff, as I’m sure you’ve heard of Carmen San Diego, and the critically acclaimed Reader Rabbit series for preschoolers. The frenzied dot-com and e-commerce scene being what it is now, Demetrius’ company got bought up just recently by Mattel, and he decided to strike out on his own and is now involved with a non-profit startup, the Project Matrix, which is dedicated to bridging the growing gap between the digital haves and have nots. So far, his organization is on track to raise several million dollars in funding by the end of the summer, thanks in part to their corraling of people such as Jesse Jackson, and John Gage of Sun Microsystems.

Lawrence, on the other hand, eschewed the non-profit track and is an out-and-out capitalist entrepreneur involved with the startup Streetspace (whose cute Internet modules you might’ve seen in many stores and cafes here in Berkeley, their testbed city) -- but unlike his pal Demetrius, Lawrence is sorta crazy. He’s doing all this startup stuff WHILE remaining in college. I admit to some blame in that, as I’ve encouraged him to stay in school anyway. I could ask him to tell us when the Streetspace IPO will be announced and what its prospects are but (a) that’s insider trading, and (b) the ridiculously overheated tech IPO scene is falling on its keister and you and I are all better off not being involved in that!

Demetrius and Lawrence are but two of the growing number of ATDP graduates and proteges who are out there now and doing good, for themselves as individuals, but more importantly as mentors and leaders in their own right. But they are only the tip of this particular ATDP story.

Later, you can go read the web version of this talk and find out more about people like Fabiola Tafolla and Rey Leon, who came from one of the poorest farming communities in in the Central Valley and now are working at the University of California’s Office of the President, involved in UC’s minority outreach and recruitment efforts. You can find out about people like Monica Flores and Argelia Leon, who started an organization called Hijas de Tonantzin in their hometown of Huron, its mission being to keep Mexican and Latina girls in school and on track for college. People like Isaac Mireles, now an undergrad at Swarthmore College who, inspired by ATDP, organized a summer academic program for inner city youth in Philadelphia. People like Angel Sanchez, who as a JC freshman in his hometown of Coalinga became the Coalinga-Huron Unified School District’s webmaster and technology coordinator, and who is again returning this summer to ATDP to be a Mentor for my Internet Classrooms. People like Carmela Guizar, who as an undergrad at Stanford also organized an after-school academic program for schoolkids in East Palo Alto, that ironic symbol of inequity right in the heart of Silicon Valley. And yes, people like Javier Gonzalez and Chuck Cisneros, who have come back to ATDP as teachers.

All these kids--well grown-ups now, really -- came to ATDP with wide eyes and wider hearts. And who, after a while, went forth into the world with open arms. And who, through the years, have kept the digital vines of connection with ATDP, this entity which has been for them a kind of home in cyberspace, a source of comfort and inspiration, an omnipresent resource for the ideas of teaching, mentoring and nurturing that they are now engaged in, in their various yet interconnected worlds. Ideas that teachers like you planted in their minds.

To conclude, allow me to make an abrupt switch from botany to cosmology.

The latest theory of how the universe began that appeals to me the most -- on an aesthetic level only, since I’m not a theoretical astrophysicist -- is that of the early universe as spawning bubble universes. The Russian cosmologist Andrei Linde’s bubble universe concept involves creation of universes from the quantum foam of the "parent universe" that sprang into being in the infinitesimally small bits of time after the Big Bang. Linde’s self-creating universe theory stems from the concept that each bubble or inflationary universe will sprout other bubble universes, which in turn, sprout more bubble universes. Needless to say, I can’t even begin to explain the most elementary aspects of the theoretical physics behind such a theory -- although I’m sure my student and co-instructor this summer, Tom Fletcher (who is attending Caltech as a freshman next fall) can assay an attempt. I'm sure Tom's Econ teacher Bette Spagel, who's teaching at ATDP this summer, agrees with me on this.

Anyway, it’s the aesthetics of Linde's theory that grabs me at the gut level. Because in its own little universe, ATDP is a nifty model of this self-replicating bubbular business. The individual students whom I’ve mentioned, and many more whom I haven’t, are only one kind of bubble. There are other kinds. For instance, just last week, two 'institutional' bubbles blossomed, seemingly from out of nothingness. (I say 'seemingly' because if you really dig at the roots, you’ll find that ATDP is a factor in the appearance of these bubbles, and what we did years and years ago turns out to be consequential.)

First, early in the week, Nina got a visit from representatives of Cal-Berkeley’s Interactive University project. Not to cast aspersions on a fine and well-intentioned effort, but several years of high-minded and high-flown rhetoric (and big bux) have not exactly resulted in the kind of progress and grassroots success in education and mentoring that we at ATDP routinely achieve. So they came to Nina, to pick her brains and get a lesson in redefining for themselves the things that really matter. Size matters, for instance. Smallness, that is. Even lofty goals backed by lofty money need to start with small, self-contained efforts. I.e., the big guys ought to learn how to blow little cosmic bubbles that could spawn other bubbles. The operative word is: grassroots. Meaning what you and I and everyone else who spends a little time teaching and mentoring at ATDP do, touching some student’s life in some small but genuinely meaningful way.

But if you think Interactive University coming to ATDP was big, well just one day later, Nina was visited by a High Muckety-Muck of Outreach and Recruitment from the University of California’s new Merced campus, which is billed as the first American research university of the new millennium. What Dr. Joseph Castro of UC Merced wanted to know was simple: how we do it. How we find and nurture students from the Central Valley, all the Ricardo Gonzalezes, the Fabiola Tafollas, the Isaac Mireleses, the Carmela Guizars. Suffice it to say, Nina’s conversation with Dr. Castro that day was only a beginning.

That conversation continues right here, with you and I and everyone now involved with the ATDP. Each of your classrooms this summer is a universe, with itself uncounted possibilities for spawning other universes. Clearly, there isn’t only one way to spawn a universe; there are as many as there are people here in this hall right now. The big difference between Andrei Linde’s charming cosmic theory and the ATDP universe is that Linde’s self-creating universe is a theory, and unfortunately one that will never be put to the test in any laboratory. The ATDP universe, on the other hand, has gone through years of testing, and its reality and success is solid, and proven.

For our new, first-time ATDP teachers out there, welcome to our universe. For those returning for their nth year, start blowing those new bubbles.

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