A sturdy young waiter with wavy blond hair appeared. He was maybe even taller than Augustus. "Do you know," he asked in a delicious accent, "what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?"
"No?" I said.
"He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.'"
"The power of purpose and meaningful contribution has been missing from our classrooms and our youth culture for some time. While life outside our schools has changed dramatically over the past century, we cling to an early industrialized classroom model that often fails to encourage collaboration, innovation, a global work ethic, or critical problem-solving skills."
"The essential skill of the 21st century is knowing how to ask the most interesting questions."
"Today, very little of the work we give students in school provides them with a sense that they are making a contribution to anything other than their own educational progress toward graduation."
"High-performance workers need to be self-directed and interdependent. Learning how to learn is an essential lifelong skill. Global empathy is a critical skill for anyone hoping to identify global opportunities and secure foreign markets and customers."
"As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, 'Some people have thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause you pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on.'"
-Anne Lamott, Stitches
Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet to Horatio
"From there we radiate out. All our activities can be infused with our core belief. When we do that, we live a life we can be proud of, and a life that has a positive effect on everyone we encounter." - Lodro Rinzler
"The sciences are the how, and the humanities are the why. Why are we here? Why do we believe in the things we believe in? I don't think you can have the 'how' without the 'why'."
“Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.”
- Maria Popova
Our ritual for teaching students to read closely developed into three steps, steps that are connected and that help students navigate this complex skill set in more approachable ways:
1. First, read through lenses: Decide what you will be paying attention to while reading and collect those details.
2. Next, use lenses to find patterns: Look across all of the details you have collected and find patterns.
3. Finally, use the patterns to develop a new understanding of the text: Consider these patterns in light of what you have already learned from the text. Put these together to develop a new understanding of the text or a deeper, evidence-based interpretation.
It is an exciting time to be young. Our students are growing up surrounded by more text and media than at any other time in human history. By some estimates, in the span of one year, roughly one million books are published and over one trillion web pages of information are accessible ("Did You Know 4.0"). Never before has so much information been so readily available. Global events unfold in real time across social networks, and questions can be researched and answered in mere moments. Our students are growing up in a world where knowledge and experience is just waiting to be harnessed."
We want our students to be more aware of the points of view and arguments embedded in most texts. We want them to read these texts closely so that they don't only walk away with a broad sense of the author's argument, but instead are able to examine texts for the subtle points they are trying to make. And we very much want students to be able to do this in their lives as well. We want them to look around their lives as they become young adults and see other's perspectives, analyze the arguments they and others are making, and critique those arguments and perspectives when they find them wanting. Above all, we want our students to gain insight and wisdom as they engage with and create their own arguments about their world.
No one book, article, poem, or play is an island.
The ritual of reading a text closely with a lens, looking for patterns, and then having new understandings is designed so that these structures become ingrained habits, and that these habits then become independent practices for your students.
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"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." - Joseph Campbell
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."- Joseph Campbell
The overarching thesis of "David and Goliath" is that for the strong, "the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness," whereas for the weak, "the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty."
It’s about the advantages of disadvantages — and the disadvantages of seeming advantages. Or, as Gladwell puts it: “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.”
"Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic. There's the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There's the flat middle, where doing more doesn't make much of a difference. And there's the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse."
My favorite quote, and I have many, about education is:
"It is a strange thing, isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning."
"The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider - as the Impressionists did - whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest."
All the various specialists come in, doing their dance. There are many ramifications of this treatment, potential disasters galore. Glitches happen every day, and we have no idea what the glitch is, what it even could be. It's not as if there is a sniper in the woods and everyone keeps their eyes on the trees, searching for a man with a gun. No one knows where the hell they should be looking or what the hell they should be looking for until something starts beeping. Or maybe there will be no beep and we don't know to expect one.
I felt a pervasive sense of helplessness. Of danger. Of responsibility. And a pervasive sense of guilt and unreality. How could she be sick and not me?
To me, having it all - if one wants to define it at all - is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up.
Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgement. It's when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.
"Our job as writers is to figure out what we can do. Only do what you can do. It's a rule I live by."
"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."
"Making is a way of bringing engineering to young learners. Such concrete experiences provide a meaningful context for understanding abstract science and math concepts. For older students, making combines disciplines in ways that enhance the learning process for diverse student populations and opens the doors to unforeseen career paths."
And you know, its possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed that question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"To paraphrase Senator Mike Johnston's call to action...
