Thanks to my friend Nick Vu for sending me this fabulous Ted talk on education and creativity. I needed to see this tonight. Education has been on my mind a lot lately because I am spending many summer hours sorting through possible PhD programs for 2011. (Applications are due this winter.)

I feel myself slowly becoming an academic, and I keep flopping between resisting and succumbing to this trajectory. Perhaps it’s all inevitable: my life path took hold with my overly-zealous encyclopedia reading in 2nd grade.

In 6th grade I built a special cart with wheels to take my loot of books to and from school. Apparently, I wanted to do as much homework as possible, and my homemade cart facilitated getting all my textbooks home. (Now, they sell backpacks with wheels; shoot, I should have patented that! Then, I could afford all this education.)

I think I started “pulling all nighters” in junior high. I can’t imagine what was so important in 7th grade that I had to learn it at 3 a.m. (Though, learning about Stonewall Jackson from Mr. Malone was so exciting.) I only got more serious in high school. By then, my thoughtful mom started bringing me tuna fish sandwiches in the middle of the night to make sure my brain had fuel. (Thanks, Mom.)

But, I will always remember my infamous breakdown senior year during a calculus test. I was putting so much pressure on myself that I finally emotionally combusted. I started crying half-way through the test and just could not stop the floodgates of tears streaming out of me. So, I walked out of class and went home right then and there and slept for 18-hours straight. I was so tired. Tired from every moment in my life when education and being a good student meant performance, perfection, and not caring well for my body.

When I went off to college, my mother had this request, “Kimberly, try to get Bs now. You will be so much happier. That extra 10% of imperfection will make your life so much better.”

I did not take her advice, but in retrospect, I can see that my mother’s advice was quite good. It always is. But, here I am. 29. And still terrified of Bs. It’s a bit concerning, really. I know that I am old enough to know better.

Sometimes I think that we graduate students are just regressed 7-year-olds trying to bring home our perfect report cards to post on the fridge. There is just is so much pressure for “perfection” within our education system—and that pressure means that it is harder to take risks, break with old systems, and ask new questions about what the meaning of education is, anyway. There is always so much on the line when every step is preparation for succeeding at the next.

I will be spending the next many months studying for GREs, writing application for PhD programs, asking professors to recommend me, and competing with super smart people for a few coveted spots, so that when/if I graduate with a PhD I can keep competing for a few coveted spots. (The academy produces way more teachers than it can hire; it’s a big problem.)

And I see those right now who are farther up on the path—the ones just graduating and working for tenure—and there still seems to be so little time to rest. So little time to play. And I am not so sure I want that life.

But, the trouble is that there is so much about the world of education that I do adore: libraries and classes and new syllabi and writing papers and the endless flow of ideas. Electricity dances inside me when I am learning. I just long for there to be less of a performance to it. Less splitting of our minds and bodies, and more caring for our whole selves. Less “perfection,” and more fruitful mistakes in our processes. Less conforming to outside standards and more of a discovery of who one are—because I really believe that our deepest, truest, most important work is found when we are most intimately connected with who we are.

So, I will stay in the system of education and try to play by its rules. But, what I really want is to break them: to take the best of what the academic world has to offer and infuse it with more life-giving values. And that’s why I want so much to be a teacher—because I have plans for re-dreaming what constitutes learning. It’s always a difficult balance, though. Essentially, I want to succeed at a system so that I can earn the credentials to try to change it. Yet this exchange is a tricky one. As Ken Robinson says in his Ted talk, we do need a revolution in education, and I want to be part of that. But, at the moment I need to do well enough in the current system of education so that I can get to the next step! This tension is perhaps why change is hard. At one point can one afford not to play by the rules?