tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
This might be my favorite line. The joy of working/finding your way "by incantation and by singing" is highlighted here, and also a sense that, despite what others might think, to be a contrarian is not to be cranky or without joy.
If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it
I have so often been called a contrarian. I think from now on I will just respond with the briefest of nods and a "so be it."
I am done with apologies.
I wonder how old Berry was when he wrote this. I feel like I am coming into the time of being done with apologies. I love it. And I love opening with it.
the result you get is not a better speller but a student less inclined to experiment in writing with bold words
oof. I feel this sentence like a gut punch. Maybe I should tattoo it on the inside of my forearm.
pervasive predictable kindness
I love this phrase "pervasive predictable kindness." I feel like i should set this as a goal for what anyone can expect from me -- i realize it might take a lot for me to achieve!
attention for what? For what purpose?
"For any student with an adequate why, any how or what will do." -- seymour pappert Again, I'm reading this from my mothering perspective, and thinking about how rarely my daughter has felt an 'adequate why' for the things she is asked to do in school. She would love to think with teachers about how what she does in school might make her a better person, might make her community a better place, might make the internet a better place..
This post is a bit stream of consciousness, and so I want to pose a question here. Which experience do you think is more educational:
@SWEL folks, this is one of the "would you rather" questions that the "would you rather" group discussed last night. I wonder, which would YOU rather?
To read and listen much much more than we speak.
To what extent do we read and listen more than we speak? How do we teach/support/challenge young people to do so?
To have them look at their information environments not as vehicles of just self-expression, but as ways to transcend their own prejudices
I can't help but think about the last year in my daughter's high school, where a social media hate campaign became public and revealed our communities basest selves and prejudices, about how many people were hurt, and how little educative support the perpetrators received to help them transcend their prejudices, their most base selves. I wish educators in her school were thinking about their roles in supporting students to use these tools in these ways.
That you might think about things for the purpose of being a better human, without an aim to produce anything at all.
Thinking about things for the purpose of being a better human is a lovely idea, and its true, it doesn't seem like one we hear about so much lately...
producing things that make the web a better place
I haven't heard so many people talking about this, especailly in terms of work that young people can do. I like it. These times call for it.
What we did was simple. We endowed each other with sense and authority and the expectation that teaching had an authentic intellectual life that, of course, each of us as professionals would participate in. We pulled brilliance from each other by listening to each other with the expectation that brilliance was there. We became fascinated with teaching by approaching it with the assumption that it was, in fact, fascinating. What if we approached our classrooms, our colleagues, our students that way? Write. Learn. Lead.
this sounds so simple. and is so different from how teachers (or maybe any professionals) learn and work together day to day. Assume that brilliance is there. Assume the work ahead is facinating. assume the problems can be worked on and solved, or at least tackled.
Why had we never been put together like this before, across the grades and subjects where we could see the whole scope of a student’s journey? Why had we never watched each other teach like this and demanded of each other the theories and rationales that lay behind our work? Why hadn’t we stopped to study and probe the routines and the handouts and the reading selections we used, taking all the tools of the teacher’s trade as seriously as we took the work of others? Why hadn’t we stopped grading, grading, grading all those papers to look at them carefully, to endow them with the expectation that the writer in good faith is trying to communicate something?
These are the questions that amazed and astounded summer institute participants still ask today. These are the questions that we have to hold onto as we plan new pathways into and through NWP experiences.
The presentation comes from what that teacher has learned through her own teaching and the work of her students; what that teacher is inquiring about in her teaching. Wait, not something assigned to us by the professor?
for me, as a teacher, this is the single most important thing that was "different" about the writing project today. An argument I make often in my work and planning.
Trust Me. This is Different.’
I love this title. It captures a single idea about the writing project that we hear over and over again. also, (spoiler alert), it is a bit of a refrain throughout the piece.
Clear-eyed. Big-hearted.
POTUS watches Friday Night Lights?
That’s the America I know.
very Whitmanesque -- I like it :-)
Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.
A rereading of or about our founding fathers with this lens would be good for all of us-- Reading Hamilton biography, Vowell's Lafayette, and watching John Adams. What else do people suggest?
t diminishes us in the eyes of the world.
and the eyes of our children...
it’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies.
THere's a better way. Indeed
infrastructures for everyone -- social security, medicare, and education. We should all get behind that sort of safety for everyone.
Community college as an opportunity for everyone. That's nice.
less leverage for a living wage, you mean.
This is HIS letter to the next president, says @Elyseea
These WOULD give us everthing we need, i think, if we, as a nation believed these were our strenghts and embraced them. What do others think are our greatest strengths as a nation?
Its fascinating that people find it "counterintuitive" that people are more likely to respect and follow authorities if they are treated with respect and fairness. Where did we get the idea that we should abuse people in order to get them to do what we think they should?