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...