Staying the Course
Leading an urban school for historically underserved kids is the hardest work with the highest consequences. And it's lonely work. School Leaders set and live the vision and values that guide our teachers every day to make it possible for all of our kids to have equal opportunities.Educators deserve and need expert witnesses to their lives who can help them stay the course at their highest level.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Kindness
Social scientists build case for 'survival of the kindest'
ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists ...
Put poetically, here is one of my favorite poets and poems.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words
Social scientists build case for 'survival of the kindest'
ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists ...
Put poetically, here is one of my favorite poets and poems.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words
Carefully Taught
Carefully Taught, from the 1950s musical South Pacific, has been playing in my head a lot recently as I track the news in Arizona, Texas and in the Middle East, as well as consider my own history. One of my sheroes, Melissa Harris-Lacewell places the song in context to the reactionary times we are experiencing. http://www.thenation.com/article/youve-got-be-carefully-taught
Carefully Taught, from the 1950s musical South Pacific, has been playing in my head a lot recently as I track the news in Arizona, Texas and in the Middle East, as well as consider my own history. One of my sheroes, Melissa Harris-Lacewell places the song in context to the reactionary times we are experiencing. http://www.thenation.com/article/youve-got-be-carefully-taught
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