I watched Clifford Stoll's TED talk.  I guess one of the things I found most inspiring was the enthusiasm with which he gave his talk.  He literally leaped around the stage excitedly running down streams of thought, delighted by the inscrutably weird nuances and sidebars of his own thought processes in the way that extreme nerds often are.  And he had that crazy tangled eagles nest of Einsteinian uncombed, gray hair indicating that he's an archetypal absent-minded professor who lives deep inside the mathematical principles that govern the universe, and not in the material world of barbers, ironed shirts and well-organized speeches that many of the rest of us live in.  

Frankly, I found much of the talk itself difficult to follow.  Why is he showing us the details of how to measure the speed of sound using an oscilloscope?  Why does he have a bunch of weird bottles that don't really function as anything other than physical manifestations of mathematical principles?  Why is the outline of his speech written in marker on his hand in a way that can't possibly be helping him to keep his thoughts organized or progress through a logically structured message?  What does his relationship with the guy who invented the Moog synthesizer have to do with anything else he's talking about?

He seems to have arrived at the decision to become a teacher in the same way I did: After a lifetime of exploring and big ideas, you end up seeing that the best way to improve the world is not so much to go around convincing people of things, but to pass on the love of learning, and the ability to think critically and discover, to real students in real classrooms in your local environment.  You start to see that many of the problems in this world could be solved or avoided if people had proper education, and that the battle to provide that education probably matters more than any other as its effects ripple through all the others.  It ends up seeming obvious that this is where you should focus your efforts, and you wonder why it hadn't occurred to you before.  Stoll only really touched on this briefly in his talk (he probably said less about it than I have here, and the topic was summarized by the word "kids" written on his hand), though I think the story of how he came to be an eighth grade science teacher was sort of his central narrative.  At the very least, it was the thing he started talking about after he spent half the talk telling us what he'd like to talk about but wasn't going to.

Ultimately, this talk was more like a spoken word performance of a poem than a well structured argument leading to a rational conclusion.  It climaxed with a story about him lugging his college physics books through a riot during the Viet Nam era, being chased by a cop, running up the bell tower overlooking the violently chaotic clash between police and protesters on the grounds below and having an existential crisis wondering "why am I here?"  After which, he reads the inscription on the tower bell that says, "All truth is one. In this light, may science and religion endeavor together for the steady evolution of Mankind: From darkness to light, From narrowness to broadmindedness, From prejudice to tolerance, It is the voice of life that calls us To come and learn."  It illustrates this seminal moment that causes his love of learning to splatter into the many directions that show up in his TED Talk.  He never bothers to try to connect any of the things he talked about or explain how they all have some common thread or underlying principle.  He just describes the moment, gives the quote and leaves it hanging there for us to put together.  

It was pretty awesome.