I made this

The best questions from This Is Marketing by Seth Godin...

"Who's it for?" 

"What change do I seek to make?" 

"The question to just about every question about work is really the question, "Who can you help?" 

Marketing isn't advertising. Marketing is the act of making change happen. Effective marketing now relies on empathy and service.

The idea of "I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"

"Here, I made this" is an offering. It's easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve. Adopt a posture of service; set out to be of service.

This book can help you: spread your ideas, make the impact you seek, and improve your culture.

“When they go low, we go high.”

I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: 

You matter.
As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation.

I picked up three copies of BECOMING by Michelle Obama so my mom, sister, and I could read it together.

My favorite part of the book was Becoming More.
Warning: It's hard to finish this book without shedding tears.

This is a fantastic book ... it's more than politics... it's about being a woman, being a better person, marriage, motherhood, and using your voice.

"For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it more as a forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to continuously reach toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end. I became a mother, but I still have a lot to learn from and give to my children. I became a wife, but I continue to adapt to and be humbled by what it means to truly love and make a life with another person. I have become, by certain measures, a person of power, and yet there are still moments when I feel insecure or unheard.  

It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing up to be done."

I highly recommend this book as a holiday gift for everyone you know. 

a joy story

I was at a workshop on conflict resolution and the facilitator showed us this adorable video:





After watching, we discussed the difference between defending positions and recognizing needs. It has stayed with me ... and I think it can help mobilize people to see things differently.

For more tools in dealing with conflict resolution, check out this article from the University of Texas at Austin. I especially liked “What is the underlying reason or the ‘why’ behind what I want?” Refer to Focus on Interests (Needs), Not Positions (Wants) for more information. And Open Ended Questions...

Examples of open-ended questions:

• What’s your basic concern about …?
• What do you think about …?
• How could we fix …?
• What would happen if …?
• How else could you do …?
• What could you tell me about …?
• Then what?
• Could you help me understand …?
• What do you think you will lose if you …?
• What have you tried before?
• What do you want to do next?
• How can I be of help?

Blessed are the damn-givers

On this post-midterm Wednesday, I am reading HOPE And Other Superpowers: A Life-Affirming, Love-Defending, Butt-Kicking, World-Saving Manifesto by John Pavlovitz.

Do you know anyone who could use some HOPE today?
If you do, please get this book for them.

"I wrote this book to help compassionate, kind, generous people keep going." - John Pavlovitz

Parts from the Introduction that had me hooked:

We need to rediscover the optimism of our youth, to remember when the desire to change the world felt reasonable and not shamefully naive, when doing something heroic seemed possible and didn't merit ridicule or a rolling of the eyes. In times when people seem increasingly immune to others' pain, we need to unapologetically wield hearts still willing to bleed, and then affix them to our sleeves and step into the daylight looking for gaps in the world that we alone can fill.

And this heroic existence we're called to is about doing the small and simple things that most people lose sight of, the things that may not make the news or trend on social media, but that generate beautiful ripples nonetheless. It's about chipping away at the image of the life we think we're supposed to have and uncovering the life that we deserve to live, the kind the planet is made better by. It's about understanding that we have far more power at our disposal than we're aware of. There is a transcendent way of living that can begin to alter the planet in real time - right now - and it's fully accessible to each of us regardless of what we do, where we live, or how much influence we think we have. That's the amazing truth at work here: the world has always been transformed by fully ordinary people whose willingness to show up, to brave damage, and to risk failure yielded extraordinary results.

In 1871, while preaching a sermon opposing slavery in America, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said, "The arc of the universe bends toward justice." His words were echoed almost a century later by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as solace for those looking around at the unbridled bigotry of the day and feeling like the decent people were losing. Embedded in this phrase is the promise that over time, in ways that we can't always perceive from where we're standing at a given moment, humanity does evolve toward goodness.

From the first chapter, the author draws on his love of comic books and superheroes. The ordinary superpowers that he promotes are compassion, sacrifice, courage, humor, humility, honesty, kindness, creativity, persistence, wonder, and gratitude. 

Every hero is pulled into significance differently. Batman rises from the ashes of his parents' murder to defend a crime-riddled Gotham. Wonder Woman feels compelled to come to the aid of outnumbered Allied soldiers facing the Third Reich, after being cared for by one of them. Black Panther fully claims his birthright as king after realizing his nation's former missteps. Spider-Man is transformed after recognizing the great responsibility accompanying his great power. Black Widow is moved to make amends  for her deadly assassin's past. They all become undeniably heroic, yet in ways and circumstances  that look nothing alike and with completely unique motivations. In the same way, you and I will each receive a one of a kind, time-sensitive invitation to step into a better version of ourselves: a personal tragedy, a national crisis, a cause that moves us, or a desire to use a gift for the good of others. 

Be sure to check out John's blog Stuff That Needs To Be Said. Especially his post today entitled To Exhausted and Young Voters. 

Keep doing the work that matters!
Don't you dare stop now :)

They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.

On Saturday, October 27th a gunman, who expressed a hatred of Jews, entered a Pittsburgh synagogue killing 11 people and wounding six.

The shooter was angry because he thought Jewish communities were funding a caravan of terrorists trying to infiltrate the United States.

From this article in the Atlantic... Trump's Caravan Hysteria Led To This

The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread, and that his followers chose to amplify. 

As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, those who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of anti-Semitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.  

From the Open Culture post that accompanies this video...

In the short New York Times opinion video above, Stanley summarizes his “formula for fascism”—a “surprisingly simple” pattern now repeating in Europe, South America, India, Myanmar, Turkey, the Philippines, and “right here in the United States.”

And as a reminder that we've been here before:
In 1939, some 20,000 Americans attended a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden, New York. In the video clip, Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German-American Bund (the US wing of the Nazi party), attacks the media and minorities... Link to Video

From the Politico article, When Nazis Filled Madison Square Garden:

Those who have studied the Bund’s rise and fall are alarmed at the historical parallels. “When a large group of young men march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ it’s only steps removed from chanting ‘death to the Jews’ in New York or anywhere else in the 1930s,” says David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “When those young men chant ‘blood and soil,’ it conveys the same meaning as those decades before who chanted ‘blut and boden,’ referring to the Nazi glorification of and link between race and land.” 

“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” says Arnie Bernstein, the author of Swastika Nation, a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles—today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”

And today Madeleine Albright tweeted:

Which gave me the idea...

Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, Boise

#BlackFridays

Glennon Doyle has started RAGE TO CHANGE: #BlackFridays. Be sure to read her blog post and the Instagram post that preceded it.

It is a wonderful idea to turn RAGE into something positive and actionable.

After reading How To Be Less Stupid About Race by Crystal M Fleming, that question for fighting any kind of oppression "What do I do now?" was answered with:

"The answer is going to vary for each individual, depending on your personality and background, interests, talents, and inclinations. So, it’s your job to figure out how you can best leverage your knowledge and skills to help humanity."

My action today... I started with some VOTE pins and Black paper hearts:

... and used my talents, interests, and inclinations to make:

Join #BlackFridays HERE.
View a #BlackFridays Action Toolkit HERE.
Host an event HERE.

Also, listen to today's Call Your Girlfriend podcast entitled Women's Anger with Rebecca Traister. Rebecca Traister's new book, Good And Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger is on sale now. 

The final tally from today's cloture vote on Bret Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination was 51-49. The final vote may come as early as Saturday. For smart thoughts and links on Kavanaugh, turn to Rebecca Traister, Irin Carmon, Jenée Desmond Harris, Laura McGann, Brittany Packnett

On Fridays we wear black!
Happy #BlackFridays

skills to help humanity

I am reading How To Be Less Stupid About Race by Crystal M. Fleming. I heard Dr. Fleming (@alwaystheself) interviewed and thought that this sounded like a great book on getting to the heart of racism in America. How To Be Less Stupid About Race definitely delivers on its title by inspiring critical thinking and in-depth reflection on past, present, and future effects of systemic racism and white supremacy.

Read a portion of the introduction HERE.

The book begins with a guide to Critical Race Theory, then applies that theory to today. It's a hard look at systemic racism in our institutions... especially: education, politics, media, and pop culture (I'm talking to you, ye).

By chapter seven, Becoming Racially Literate, Dr. Fleming writes:

If you've made it this far in the book, then you've faced a lot of uncomfortable truths, and I want to thank you for taking this journey with me. I know from personal experience that studying oppression and confronting racial stupidity can be terribly demoralizing.

I appreciated the recognition that this is hard, but we can do hard things. The “What exactly should I do now?” question in chapter seven acknowledges that there is no one answer: 

The answer is going to vary for each individual, depending on your personality and background, interests, talents, and inclinations. So, it’s your job to figure out how you can best leverage your knowledge and skills to help humanity.

Read this book if you are interested in preventing racism and fighting oppression.

Listen to Dr. Crystal M. Fleming discuss her book...

and I'm not alone in telling them

I was listening to a PRI radio show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge in the car. The episode was called When Sin Bears Fruit. It was about a famous lynching in Marion, Indiana in the summer of 1930. And the story of the song, “Strange Fruit,” which was inspired by that lynching. And, finally, a new novel, which begins on that terrible day in Marion in 1930. It’s called The Evening Road by Laird Hunt. 

Listening to this show and hearing Laird Hunt read from his book, was so moving I had to pull over and write down the title, The Evening Road, so I would remember to read it.

The final part that Laird Hunt reads aloud:

But I kept hearing it in my head. Keep hearing it. Down the years and always banging at my door. And when it comes, when I'm thinking back, the devil-hot, blister-bright afternoon sky I am driving through turns to black and the air grows scorching ever hotter and the cornsilks' heads glow red with the heat of it and they cackle and roar and move in their glowing thousands for the jail. The earth starts to shake when they go. The Director commences to rise up into the air and slam down. Up and slam down and I can barely get the door open but I leave the Director and go with them. I am in the crowd and above it and the sheriff steps aside and they take their sledgehammers to the walls and beat their way in. Then they are pouring across the tile floors and past the iron doors and through the hallways of the big jail and there I go pouring with them and as we pour there are shouts about God and about country and about honor and about truth and about death and death and death and we pour up the stairs and find where they are holding the boys. I'm not dreaming, it's something I'm seeing, I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop. The first boy is beat to death right there, then dragged around, then hung from the bars on the cell window. Then one by one they take the others. They drag them dead and about-to-be dead through the night and the heat and the roaring crowd and the universe twitching to the killing trees.

The part that made me pull over: "...I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop." And I keep thinking about that part. I read The Evening Road back in August and it comes back to me again and again: at the end of the movie, The BlacKkKlansman, during Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, again and again.

"...I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop." 

justice and rebellion

I don't know much about tennis. I have no idea what constitutes coaching during a match and what doesn't. But, this year I watched the U.S. Open to see Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka play tennis in what I had heard would be an amazing game.

However, watching the match and the aftermath left me with that prickly feeling I get when I see women treated unjustly. 

It made me start thinking about anger and our bias toward what is an acceptable form of anger from women. Anger is both an understandable and justifiable emotion. When you feel as though you are being treated unjustly, it is natural to become angry. But when the story becomes about your anger rather than the injustice... which happens quite often to women... something has gone wrong. Women should be able to deal with their anger by being angry.

So these were the thoughts going through my head the week after the U.S. Open. (and knowing that it was not just thoughts about the U.S. Open, but thoughts about generations of injustice and bias against women ... especially women of color)

The week following the U.S. Open, with my "social justice warrior" senses on high alert, my daughter came home from high school visibly upset about an interaction with a male teacher. He had called her opinions "sassy". The same opinions expressed by a male student. Yet my daughter was asked to apologize to the teacher for her anger. The interaction felt sexist and unjust. "Oh, hell no!" was my initial reaction. But, my daughter told me not to worry, "I've got this. I was frustrated," she said, "but arguing with him will do no good."

I think the thing that has bothered me the most, was my daughter had been advocating for student choice in reading. She had told the teacher that she didn't like the book and that she believed student choice creates life-long readers and thinkers. The book they were required to read was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The book was a life changing, favorite book of the teacher. But the idea of a Personal Legend or an ideal destiny did not resonate with my teenage daughter. 

I get it. It's like telling teenagers that Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is revolutionary. It was ... in the 1950s. But few students today are shocked by a teenager dropping out of school, cursing, and roaming the streets. 

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I know it has something to do with social justice, our ability to express our opinions without bias, and student voice. It's small steps in the right direction ... to set your jaw squarely into a strong wind, and keep moving forward. And, at the same time, I realize that my daughter and I sit in a place of privilege when our injustice is being called "sassy" and being forced to apologize to the man in charge. I get it.

And yet...

And yet, I encourage women and students everywhere to continue to put voice to your truth. 

I'll leave you with Sydney Chaffee's TEDx talk that I like to call "welcoming rebellion" ...

"... sometimes we are the ones our students rebel against. Sometimes they are going to point out ways in which systems that we have created or in which we are complicit contribute to inequity. It is going to be uncomfortable and it's going to be painful as they push us to question our own assumptions and beliefs. But what if we change the way we think about rebellion in our kids? When our kids rebel; when they thoughtfully push back against our ideas or the way that we do things...  what if we chose to see that as a sign that we are doing something right?"

critical civic empathy

I'm reading Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement by Nicole Mirra.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find somewhere online to download the Foreword and Introduction to share because they are so powerful and thoughtful. I have highlighted nearly every line.

Let me list some of my favorite parts... from the Foreword:

Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno begins his 1966 essay "Education After Auschwitz" with the now famous lines, "the premiere demand of all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it ... never again Auschwitz." Adorno taps into two truths that critical educators have held onto for most of the past century: 1) that the education children receive can increase hatred and barbarism in the world, and 2) that a critical and reflexive educational experience can help increase the authentic dialogue, intercultural understanding, and civic action that may help significantly reduce acts of hatred and intolerance in our increasingly heterogeneous and interconnected society.

Unfortunately, like Adorno, we must continually justify a critical approach to teaching and learning. The global industrial rhetoric around primary, secondary, and tertiary education prioritizes workplace readiness, quantifiable literacy, and numeracy skills above all else. It is rare to find any measure of school system success that includes kindness, empathy, or proclivity to act toward justice in the world. As Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund would say, "Shame on us!" Although academic literacy rates are rising domestically and internationally, and more young people than ever are accessing secondary and tertiary education, we see daily - in acts of violence, prejudice, intolerance, and oppression - the need to revisit Adorno's question: What good is increased access to education if it does not serve to make the world a more peaceful and connected community?

... how can education increase civic dialogue while also fostering academic and critical literacies for our most vulnerable populations?

How can English teachers, in their daily interactions with students, address disciplinary content while also fostering empathy and civic engagement? How can we conceptualize literacy to encompass active citizenship and a regard for others? How can English teachers utilize the imaginative texts of our discipline like novels, plays, poems, memoirs, films, musical lyrics, and digital narratives to foster what Maxine Greene calls a social imagination in the service of what Mirra terms a critical civic empathy?

And from the Introduction:

Several years ago, the Pew Research Center (2014) posed these questions in a survey to a nationally representative sample of 10,000 U.S. adults: 

*How do you think you would react if a member of your immediate family told you they were going to marry someone of a different race? How about a gun owner? Or someone who does not believe in God?

*Imagine you are moving to another community. Would living in a place where most people share your political views be important to you? 

*Think about elected officials in Washington who share your positions on the most important issues facing the nation. Should they work with elected officials they disagree with, even if it results in some policies you don't like? 

The primary purpose of the survey was to explore political polarization; however, considering the extent to which these questions grapple with our interactions with people who hold different perspectives and experiences from our own, it also can be seen as a sort of referendum on empathy. These questions, in effect, were asking: Can you work with, live with - even love - people unlike yourself?

The responses suggested that empathy was in dangerously short supply, and follow-up data from the Pew Research  Center (2017) indicate that the trends are continuing to worsen. Many citizens are retreating into ideological silos in which their political views determine not only how they vote, but also whom they befriend, where they live, and how they define political progress. Media experts warn that too many of us are learning about and responding to these challenges from news outlets and social networks that reflect our existing opinions and biases back to us, creating what they call an "echo chamber" effect. Facebook algorithms seek to determine our political persuasions and direct us to like-minded content, while cable news networks predictably interpret (and sometimes bend or obfuscate) facts to appeal to liberal or conservative voters. The overall message that emerged from the study: We hold fiercely to our views, we want to be surrounded by others who share them, and we don't want to compromise with those who don't.

In a 2006 speech at Northwestern University, then-senator Barack Obama declared:

"There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone's shoes; to see the world through those that are different from us - the child who's hungry, the laid off steel worker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room."

Empathy. The concept is now popping up with regularity in news articles and opinion pieces - it seems as if everyone is thinking about who should be empathizing with whom and how all of us can be empathizing more, particularly in the wake of the polarizing 2016 U.S. presidential election.

I suggest in this book that the development of empathy in students (and teachers) should be considered a primary goal of education because it offers an organizing principle for our field grounded in hope, love, and a commitment to a more equitable society. Embracing a purpose to shape young adults who can step outside their personal experience to compassionately imagine the lives of others and act civically based on those experiences can help our profession prioritize and streamline our practice so that, instead of feeling pulled in a million directions, we stand committed to one.

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." - James Baldwin

Philosopher Maxine Greene argues that reading allows young people to develop a "social imagination" that they can use to imagine various selves and different visions of a just society. Once students can imagine a range of possible worlds, they are better prepared to begin building the ones they want to see.

Without more attention to what it means to participate in the structures of power of our democratic system. let alone to analyze the flaws in these structures, civic education falls far short of preparing students to tackle the political challenges of our time.

We are individuals, but our individuality is couched within overlapping social constructs, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, that have historical, economic, and political ramifications. If we as individuals seek to empathize with others as individuals, we are likely to, first, interpret experiences in ways that revert to what is familiar to us and, second, miss out on the significance of those social constructs for how we interact in public life.

In fact, we must consider that the very ideas of empathy and perspective taking are politicized and inequitable. Those with more power across any number of social constructs, from race and gender to religious and sexual orientation, often fail to consider their perspectives as just that - perspectives - because they are so accustomed to seeing them represented as the norm in society. By contrast, those with less power constantly are forced to navigate the views of others in order to survive, while seeing theirs minimized, bothered, or outright ignored. Calling for students to learn empathy without taking these power dynamics into account can easily become an exercise in papering over generations of implicitly and explicitly enforced hegemony.

Nicole Mirra proposes a new concept to guide the work of educators - critical civic empathy.

Critical civic empathy is about more than simply understanding or tolerating individuals with whom we disagree on a personal level; it is about imaginatively embodying the lives of our fellow citizens while keeping in mind the social forces that differentiate our experiences as we make decisions about our shared public future. Critical civic empathy has three defining principles:

1. It begins from an analysis of the social position, power, and privilege of all parties involved. 

2. It focuses on the ways that personal experiences matter in the context of public life. 

3. It fosters democratic dialogue and civic action committed to equity and justice. 

And finally, Figure 1.1 Typology of Empathy: Imaginative Refusal, False Empathy, Individual Empathy, and Critical Civic Empathy

First, we must acknowledge that there are many examples of speech and action that embody the exact opposite of empathy - examples of individuals striving to foster fear of others and sow seeds of division and political cynicism. I label these as expressions of imaginative refusal because they show no concern for mutual humanization and seek to break down rather than build up faith in collaborative democratic action to address the challenges we face as a nation. They represent individuals who lack the imagination needed to relate to others or the will to develop it.

But there are also those who, while they have no true interest in mutual humanization, utilize the rhetoric  of empathy for craven political gain. Within this category, which I call false empathy, I place politicians who talk about virtues of "American values" or the "American people," but in a coded way that refers to only some values or some Americans with whom they agree.

The third category in the typology - individual empathy - refers to the aforementioned most popular understanding of empathy as the ability to walk a mile in someone's shoes while avoiding consideration of what it means to support them as a fellow citizen. Again, if we claim to empathize with someone who differs from us in any of the social constructs that stratify public life but then do not vote in favor of policies that would help redress past injustices or prevent future injustices, our compassion remains at the individual level and can serve to maintain an inequitable status quo. 

The typology of empathy is a lot to unpack. But individual empathy is where many of us get stuck. It is where many school programs tend to focus.

Nicole Mirra goes on to say:

To tell young people that they will have equal opportunities to succeed if they play by the rules and treat others as they would like to be treated harms all young people. For those on the privileged side of inequities, this rhetoric can blind them to the structural forces working in their favor and leave them thinking that individual merit alone causes their successes; for those on the marginalized side, it can leave them with defect orientations about themselves or their communities and cause civic alienation.

This section reminded me of the first two lines of the book, The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.     “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

I believe that parents and teachers want young people to be more than just prepared for college and career. I think we want future generations to tackle challenges with thoughtfulness, grace, and compassion. Critical civic empathy combined with literary texts offers a look into this work. Let's help students learn how to use their literacy skills to advocate for themselves and their communities.

audacious, authentic and inspirational

While traveling recently, I read Yes We Still Can by Dan Pfeiffer, senior advisor to President Barack Obama.

Since Donald Trump was inaugurated I have been on an emotional and physical roller coaster ride. From the rolling back of environmental regulations to the separation of immigrant families at the border, the litany of outrages has caused anger, cynicism, and sadness. This book is a road map to the future, an attempt “to better understand the current state of politics and look at where we go from here.”

Some of my favorite parts:

"Mr. President... you've talked a lot about how we're all trying to get our paragraph right in history. What do you hope that paragraph says about you?"The president replied, "When I think about what will most  gratify me, it will be if, twenty years from now, I can look back and I can say, wow, look at all these people who first got involved - maybe even when they were too young to vote - in government, politics, issues, nonprofits, public service, and that wave just kind of - a cleansing wave just washes over the country. And if that happens, then the details of how we dealt with climate change, or whether the individual responsibility on the Affordable Care Act was the right approach or not - that becomes less important. Because if we're getting the broad direction right, this is a pretty ingenious country, full of ingenious people, and we'll figure it out. And that's what I want - is I want everybody to feel like we can figure this out if we just don't waste a lot of time doing dumb stuff."

Obama made the case that the campaign was worth running because he had something to say that he felt was with saying. 

At the end of the conversation, Obama looked me right in the eye and asked, "How often do you get to put your shoulder against the wheel of history and push?"

At the 2016 Democratic Convention, Michelle Obama described the Democrats' response to Trump's infantile antics and vulgar insults as "when they go low, we go high." In the end, the side that went "low" won the election and a debate ensued in the Democratic Party about whether going "high" was the right response to Trump.

Trump is a symptom of the plague that has infected the GOP, but he is not the disease itself. Trump didn't take over the party; he is the end result of a party that weaponized  racial anxiety to motivate their base during the Obama era. The good news is that this is not a sustainable strategy in a country that is getting more diverse by the minute.

And finally... the final lines:

Obama knew what I was asking, and he sighed and shook his head and said, "Look, this isn't an ideal situation to say the least," and then we both laughed. Then he said, "Maybe I'm just looking for a silver lining, but I am hopeful that this will be the clarifying event that will show the public the two different visions for the country." 

And there it was; the eternal optimism and unending faith in the American people. 

I am going to miss him.We are going to miss him.

 In the end, Pfeiffer advocates that America take the high ground. “Hate worked for Trump; it won’t work for us,” he writes. “It requires being audacious, authentic and inspirational.” 

Here's to the 2018 midterms.

May we be audacious, authentic and inspirational!

harnessing individuality

Last month I read the book The End Of Average: Unlocking Our Potential By Embracing What Makes Us Different by Todd Rose.

The book begins with the following story...


Jet Cockpits and The End of Average from Future for Learning on Vimeo.

The Air Force realized performance results for pilots were improved when they stopped designing for "average" but made jet cockpits adjustable. It's a story of how a clear and pragmatic change can have big results. Todd Rose - author of "The End of Average" - uses the story to wonder and provoke how human potential can be unlocked in the U.S. by considering how schools can be re-designed and updated for the future.


Institutions, like education, operate under the misguided belief that statistical averages are a good way to measure individuals. Excellence, too often, is not prioritized over conforming to the system.  Author, Todd Rose, draws on the latest research to show how, when we focus on individual findings rather than group findings or averages, we can rethink the world and everyone’s potential in it.

The End Of Average reminds us that we are not anything close to average.  Average is a statistical myth. The question that drives this book is "How can a society predicated on the average ever create the conditions for understanding and harnessing individuality?"

Check out more about Todd Rose and his desire to change society one student at a time in this video:

"The ideal that we call the American dream is one we all share - the dream of becoming the best we can be, on our own terms, of living a life of excellence, as we define it." -Todd Rose

Finally, check out Todd's TEDx talk...