compassion

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” 

- Andrew Boyd

Rhythm and Resistance

Rethinking Schools has published Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice, edited by Linda Christensen and Dyan Watson.

@pennykittle tweeted about Rhythm and Resistance...

penny kittle ‏@pennykittle  Aug 30North Conway, NH

What a resource from @RethinkSchools! Can't wait to start reading & writing poetry with students this week.

13 retweets49 favorites

I always love Penny Kittle's recommendations, so I got a copy and it does not disappoint!

The opening chapters of Rhythmn and Resistance demonstrate how poetry can build classroom community and develop students' confidence in their writing.

The opening poem by the book's co-author "Why Poetry? Why Now?" makes Linda Christensen my new literary hero:

Why Poetry? Why Now?
by Linda Christensen

You ask, "Why a book on poetry? Why now?

Because we stand at the brink of public
education's demise;
because funds from billionaires
control the mouths of bureaucrats,
who have sold students, teachers,
and their families for a pittance;

because curriculum slanted to serve the "job market"
carves away history and humanity,
poetry and narrative,
student lives and teacher art;

because teaching students to write an essay
without teaching them to write
narratives like poetry is like
teaching someone to swim
using only one arm;

because poets are truth tellers and lie breakers
wordsmiths and visionaries
who sling metaphors in classrooms,
in the narrow slices of school hallways,
on the bricks of public courtyards,
and cafes with blinking neon signs
without laying out a dime to corporations;

because new poets are rising up,
pressing poems against windows on Wall Street,
spilling odes down the spines of textbooks,
posting protest hymns on telephone poles,
bubbling lyrics on the pages of tests
designed to confine their imaginations;

because poems hover under the breath
of the boy in the baseball cap,
the girl with a ring in her nose,
the boy with his mom's name inked on his neck,
and the silent ones in the back:
she's the next Lucille Cliffton
and he sounds like Roque Dalton, saying:

"poetry, like bread,
is for everyone."


At a time when students and teachers are smothered by testing, Rhythm and Resistance is a reminder of the larger vision of education. 

Poetry, it turns out, can remind students and teachers alike that their words, their thoughts, and their lives matter.

RIP Cecil

Over the past few days I have been following on twitter the death of Zimbabwe's beloved lion, Cecil.

The lion's tragic death has sparked both outrage and heartbreak...



I don't begin to understand the world of Trophy Hunting. But I do like what this hunter had to say...

I have been trying to wrap my head and heart around the senseless killing of a beautiful lion and America's role in Big Game Trophy Hunting around the world. But, so far, that has been an unproductive exercise.

Instead, I am hoping that Cecil's death inspires compassion and grace and seeing ourselves with new eyes. And, as Hazel Grace Lancaster would say:

“I want to minimize the number of deaths I’m responsible for.”   -The Fault In Our Stars

So, I used my go-to:  Post-It Notes and a little glitter...

... hoping these little memorials will inspire compassion and grace and reflection.

equal dignity in the eyes of the law

"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law," Justice Kennedy wrote of same-sex couples in the case. "The Constitution grants them that right."

It is so ordered...

"Why are you crying?" my kids asked as I read the final paragraph of Justice Anthony Kennedy's Opinion.

This gif may explain some of my feelings.

From Statutory Bans to Constitutional Bans... it all felt so hopeless. But so many brave and hopeful people fought on.

And H repeated his favorite Nelson Mandela quote to me:

"It always seems impossible until it is done."

It was a momentous day for civil rights. From this day forward there is no more gay marriage and straight marriage. Now, in America, there is just marriage. And that is awesome.

I knew I had to do something. Something to celebrate this awesome day... so I decided on glitter bombs and post it notes:  #LoveWins

Victor Hugo once remarked: “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.”

find the Blue Ocean

This weekend has been a bit crazy. 
Will and I have been sharing pictures back and forth...
I am with H in Utah at a Pokemon tournament. He is in Idaho with V at a reined cow horse show.

As we were sharing pictures, one word kept popping into my mind: quirky.


And one book too... one I read and had since forgotten about bubbled back up into my thoughts: Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a fabulous concept you should know about, if you don't already. It is simple... most people stick to confined areas and compete like crazy for the same pool of resources and opportunities. The competition can get fierce (imagine college entrance or career paths). However, the ocean is huge and vast and loaded with abundance. You just need to swim out into the blue water - where maybe no one else is, or few others have ventured.

It can feel scary or quirky or like a fools errand, but that's how different feels. Take whatever it is that makes you different, unique, interesting, uncommon and turn that into a fascinating story.

Get out there and meet new people, attend events, join an organization, find a mentor... There are other people out there who love the fascinating and wonderful and strange thing that you love. Go find them.

There is so much open space out there to play in. Go find your bit of Blue Ocean.

stretch across time

I'm reading the book The Road to Character by David Brooks. I love reading books and articles by David Brooks because sometimes we agree, but often we disagree. It's always an exciting journey.

The Road to Character is a perfect example. While reading it, I find myself cheering... for example, in chapter one there is a bit about reviewing the mistakes of the day each night:

"He tallies his recurring core sins and the other mistakes that might have branched off from them. Then he develops strategies for how he might do better tomorrow. Tomorrow he'll try to look differently at people, pause more before people. He'll put care above prestige, the higher thing above the lower thing. We all have a moral responsibility to be more moral every day, and he will struggle to inch ahead each day in this most important sphere."

And, in chapter two, the part about changing the question from 'What do I want from life?' to 'What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?'

"This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded. This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs. Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, 'At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world's deep need?'"

In chapter five, I found that I am, surprisingly, a big fan of George Marshall. Marshall is an example of courage and honor and obligation to community and country.

"Some people seem to have been born into this world with a sense of indebtedness for the blessing of being alive. They are aware of the transmission of generations, what has been left to them by those who came before, their indebtedness to their ancestors, their obligations to a set of moral responsibilities that stretch across time."

 I struggled more with the last 4 chapters. As is typical with my relationship with author, David Brooks. But this book has given me much food for thought, many references for further reading, and a wonderful appreciation for the character of those who have come before me.

A wonderful quote in the book by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin pretty much sums it up:

"The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself."

 

because of who you believe yourself to be

Last month I saw John Green tweeting about a book, The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday:

It is beautifully written, as John Green says, sentence-to-sentence.

The Last Flight of Poxl West weaves together two voices: Elijah Goldstein and Poxl West. Poxl West, Eli's uncle, publishes his World War II memoir Skylock to great acclaim and success. Fifteen-year-old Eli worships his uncle Poxl.

Amazon says it is a memoir within a memoir within a novel.

The book alternates between excerpts of Poxl's memoir and a grown Eli retelling his youth.

"And write about it he did. Each time he finished a new chapter he would take me somewhere new and recount to me his finest similies, the clearest arisen memory, the complicated feeling that arose as he remembered things he'd obviously spent most of his adulthood trying to forget - all for the sake of literature. For the sake of those who came after him. We talked about the fact that this is why men wrote: to leave behind their stories for those who would come years later."

It is a beautiful book about storytelling.

My favorite parts of the book are the references to Shakespeare:

"He who had been my enemy was now my friend. This was a lesson I would recognize often in the days to come. While in the pages of Othello we may feel we understand a character like Iago, when we meet him in life, he retains the capacity for change. He's not cut off from the obviation of his sins. If Othello had spared Desdemona and himself, surely he and Iago could have met in some new circumstance in their later years. There would have been memories to hash out, confessions to be made - the great dissembler would have had to try not to dissemble for once, to speak and be heard after his great sins had been unveiled. But couldn't they have been as Navigator Smith and I now were?"

"But maybe it was up until that moment, no matter what we'd done, we'd assumed we were like the vast majority of men - like Lear himself - self judged  to be more sinned against than sinning. Now something was changing in both of us the more Smith talked. As I say, if you met him in life, years later, even Iago might have turned from his role. But it could work the other way, as well, couldn't it? That line from The Merchant of Venice had crossed my mind many times in the years since Glynnis's mother and I first read it: 'If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?' Somehow I'd thought quite clearly that this line had been uttered by one of Shakespeare's great villains, not one of his great heroes."

"When I read Hamlet in my thirties, studying it in earnest and reading it for the first time since I'd encountered it in the cave with Mrs. Goldring, I came to find that there is a disagreement among Shakespeare scholars over the nature of the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, who visits him throughout the play. Some believe it is meant to be staged as a physical manifestation: The supernatural has occurred. A ghost has set foot onstage. The Tragedy of Hamlet, in this staging, is the original ghost story. But other scholars believe that it is simply a manifestation of Hamlet's guilt, the most famous indecision in all of literature: the question of whether Hamlet will act. There is no such thing as a ghost; there is only such thing as Hamlet's hallucination. To tell a tale, Hamlet famously says, is to "hold a mirror up to nature," and in the mirror we will never see the face of the dead. It is only our own image we see."

The praise for The Last Flight of Poxl West goes something like this...

"A richly layered, beautifully told, and somehow lovable story about war, revenge, and loss. A book about what we make of our heroes, and what our heroes make of us."

Keep the poem Why The Novel Is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read by Marie Howe in mind as you read this book:

Why The Novel Is Necessary but

Sometimes Hard to Read

It happens in time. Years passed until the old woman,

one snowy morning, realized she had never loved her daughter...

Or, Five years later she answered the door, and her suitor had returned

almost unrecognizable from his journeys...

But before you get to that part you have to learn the names

you have to suffer not knowing anything about anyone

and slowly come to understand who each of them is, or who each of them

imagines him or her self to be -

and then, because you are the reader, you must try to understand who

you think each of them is because of who you believe yourself to be

in relation to their situation

or to your memory of one very much like it.

Oh it happens in time and time is hard to live through.

I can't read anything anymore, my dying brother said one afternoon,

not even letters. Come on, Come on, he said, waving his hand in the air,

What am I interested in - plot?

You come upon the person the author put there

as if you'd been pushed into a room and told to watch the dancing-

pushed into parties, into basements, across moors, into

the great drawing rooms of great cities, into the small cold cabin, or

to here, beside the small running river where a boy is weeping,

and no one comes,

and you have to watch without saying anything he can hear.

One by one the readers come and watch him weeping by the river,

and he never knows,

unless he too has read the story where a boy feels himself all alone.

This is the life you have written, the novel tells us. What happens next?

The Last Flight of Poxl West is a wonderful book with a thought-provoking  final surprise.

It's about giving all the love that you've got.

I can't say enough good things about Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed.

Let me give you a taste of how awesome it is:

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” 

“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” 

“Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.” 

“Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.” 

This is a book you will carry around with you. It's a book you will return to again and again. Read a bit of it and let it sink in. Roll it around in your head for a while and then think, "Yes. That's it exactly."

My favorite bits right now are The Human Scale, The Ghost Ship That Didn't Carry Us, and The Obliterated Place. It's where I am right now, but I'm sure other bits will be my favorite at other times. That's the beauty of this book. It gives you what you need when you need it.

From The Human Scale:

"If I believed in God, I'd see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it."

"What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hands on your daughters sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?"

From The Ghost Ship That Didn't Carry Us:

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” 

From The Obliterated Place:

"I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your loss. Iamsosorryforyourloss."

“Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”  

And two quotes that have become part of me, and will stay with me always:

“But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.”

and, pardon the french...

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.” 

  

When and where have you been a part of a culture of thinking?

I am reading a great new book by Ron Ritchhart, Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. 

The price of the book is worth it for the introduction alone: Demystifying Group and Organizational Culture. Have you ever been part of a group - a book club, a committee, a travel tour, a graduate course, a club, or a classroom? Then this book is for you.

"When and where have you been a part of a culture of thinking? That is, when have you been in a place where the group's collective thinking as well as each individual's thinking was valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members?"

"Take a moment to identify a single instance from your life as a learner in which you were part of such a group." 

Do you have an experience of being in a culture of thinking in mind? Upon reflection, do you remember having a sense of purpose to the learning? Do you remember having a commitment to the task at hand? Was there a feeling of equity within the group? Was there a sense of engagement and an element of challenge? In recalling a time when you were part of a dynamic group of people learning and creating together, do you have a feeling of connection: connection to the task at hand, to the topic, to the learning, and to the group?

"It feels good to be a member of a culture of thinking. It produces energy. It builds community. It allows us to reach our potential. This is something we as educators need to remember. A culture of thinking is not about a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work."

Like I said, the introduction is amazing! 

My favorite big question in the book was: "What do you want the children you teach to be like as adults?" How would you respond to this question?

Collective responses head along these lines:

"We are hoping for someone who is curious, engaged, able to persevere, empathetic, willing to take risks and try new things, a go-getter, able to problem solve, creative, passionate about something, a listener, open-minded, healthy, committed to the community, respectful, analytical, inquisitive, a lifelong learner, an avid reader, a critical consumer, helpful, compassionate, imaginative, enthusiastic, adaptable, able to ask good questions, able to connect, well rounded, a critical thinker..."

... and the list goes on. Include your own and you'll notice that there are few traditional, measurable, testable skills mentioned.

This is an awesome book and should be read by teachers and administrators... or  anyone interested in the tools needed for unlocking, understanding, and shaping powerful learning environments that get the best out of people. 

It even contains that amazing 2011 quote by Matt Damon at the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington DC:

"As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself - my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity - all come from how I was parented and taught. And none of these qualities that I've just mentioned - none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success - none of these qualities that make me who I am...can be tested."