Dear Student,

Sometimes words fail, and you just need a poem to put words to what can't be said.

With gratitude to these two students, and all of the others, from whom I learned so much this week.



Dear Student,

There you are
to my left,
and you are crying.

Fat, round tears slipping down your cheek
from beneath your glasses
and you can't hide it
and you won't hide it.

And you shouldn't.
You are brave.

And we hear you now
in your hurting.

"I'm sorry,"
you whimper.
"I've never cried
about a book before."

And we are all crying,
but none of us have tears
like yours.

Your neighbor rubs your shoulder.
Everyone is with you,
together in your tears.



Dear Student,

You and I had never met,
and yet
there we sat,
in your kitchen,

that deadly blinking cursor
on a white screen
beckoning you to write what was on your heart.

"A college essay?" you ask.
And this is how they'll judge me?"

"Just make them feel something."
It doesn't have to be everything.
Just a glimpse. Don't tell them who you are...
show them."

And you do.

You take a tomb full of broken ideas
and biographical pain
and gnarled genealogy
and you make magic of the cracked mirrors.

Hours later, your mother tells me
that you knelt,
empowered by the truth of those mirrors,
alongside a teammate
before a game,
shuddering under the weight
of a world of eyes,
a cracked mirror in a sea of lies.

And in that kneeling,
you are winning:
winning a game
where no one loses.

Unknown Unknowns (what I told my students today)

I started class today with this clip. 

There was nothing political about the topic. Nor was the lesson today about weapons of mass destruction, or Baghdad, or the Middle East, or diplomacy.

And it wasn't about Donald Rumsfeld.

It was about the most foundational component of my 8th grade world cultures course...it was about recognizing that our own experiences are an aberration from the norms of human experience.

This classroom needs to have a culture of its own. It's already starting to take shape, but it needs each of us to have a sense of heightened awareness...heightened sensitivity.

There are things we know. 

We know lots of things.

And there are things we think we know.

We think we know lots of things.

And there are things we know we don't know.

And there are things we don't even know we don't know.

We are naive, oblivious, and completely in-the-dark about most things in the world.

And I include myself in that statement.

And all of those things matter. 

You see, my hope for this class is that you will grow to trust that each of us comes into this classroom with the best of intentions. That we are here to learn, here to share, and here to listen. Nobody wants to offend, alienate, or provoke. Nobody wants to make anybody else hurt.

I believe this.

But in order for us to do that effectively, we have to trust each other and recognize that if someone doesn't know something--if they have literally never learned it before--that's not their fault. If somebody has a stereotype about a group of people, or thinks they know something, but your experience differs, it is your responsibility to help them understand it better; to illustrate the oppositional perspective. 

In this course, we need to aspire to be more culturally competent, more aware, and more curious versions of ourselves. We can never learn it all. There will always be unknown unknowns...but this course is about raising our awareness so they can be known unknowns...so we can begin to recognize that the things we know--the lenses through which we experience the world--are such a smidgen of a much bigger human story. 

Most of the world is an unknown unknown. If we can recognize that simple fact, perhaps the mere shifting of awareness can orient the world toward grasping that our planet can be a  known unknown, meaning that our own ethnocentric perspectives are but one version of reality; "other cultures are not failed attempts at being you" (Wade Davis).

The Fire of Adolescence

It's Friday.

There is a perfectionist that owns a bundle of the real estate deep within me. And right now, all those perfectionist parts in me are berating me with criticism for having watched idly as Thursday passed without having written a new post.  But you know what? I wasn't idle at all. Note remotely.

Instead, I was living alongside my students. Nothing compares to the experiences of watching young people become better versions of themselves; watching them carve away the passive parts of themselves, only to find that there are amazing, capable, brave, and mature young men and women waiting in the wings of their life.

Today I told my students that the past week we spent together in the Adirondacks was equipping them with the ability to become the heroes of their own lives.

Nobody wants to grow complacent.
Nobody wants to be a passive participant in their own lives.
Nobody wants to be cast in their life as "third blond boy" or "girl with the backpack."

But we do it all the time. I find myself reverting to auto pilot on my commutes, my routines, and my interactions.

We need to break form. To take risks.

My students were made to be the heroes. They are protagonists. Their stories are written with deep dreams and meticulously developed character traits. There are internal struggles, foibles, challenges, and climaxes. There are moments that require real heroism, and that elicit deep sorrows.

The shapes of my students' stories are varied and REAL. They are different and they are the same.

And just like that, I am reminded of a moment .

The students looked into a fire, huddled close to one another, and forgot about themselves. Their gazes bled into one another's, and they saw the impossible beauty of the flames, the gleam of the light, the reflection of the moon on the water around them. They stopped being themselves and transformed into a breathing, living organism with its own energy.

Like fires, adolescence can gleam and spark, but it can also grow dull, cool, and turn to ash. This past week reminded me that all fires need three things

Heat
Fuel
& Oxygen

I think, in both a literal and figurative sense, the same is true of human beings.

The origins of their physical heat, their physical fuel, and physical oxygen matter; and so, too, do the sources of emotional heat, emotional fuel, and emotional oxygen.

For four days, we got it right. Now that we return to the classrooms, to the routines, it's all about maintaining the fire triangle, because fires don't work on auto pilot. And I'm pretty sure there's no app that gathers the kindling.

The Both

I love people.

I always have. I enjoy being around them, connecting with them, and being real with them. Which is why I always find it funny that I have such an aversion to my return to school each September.

You see, as I mentioned before, I love the people. I also love the anticipation, the school, the content, the hopefulness, and the rebirth. I love the conversations, the colleagues, the students, too. What I don't love, though, is the simple question that seems to begin every interaction during our first week back:

"How was your summer?"

I used to think that it was because I never went anywhere on vacation. Vacation was time off, but it was never time away. Growing up, I always felt a sense of embarrassment at this fact. "Oh!" my friends would sometimes say, "A stay-cation! That sounds awesome!"

But it wasn't a stay-cation...it was just life. Life happening in my back yard, my world. And it was good--awesome, even--but it certainly wasn't impressive or postcard-worthy.

Yet here's the thing. Even now that I've arrived at a point of greater maturity and self confidence, I still don't like this question. It just feels like when someone says, "Hey, today's my birthday," and the only way to possibly respond is by exclaiming, "Happy Birthday!!" When someone says, "How was your summer?" the requisite response that spills out on cue like TGIF's canned laughter is "Great, how was yours?"

But this year, it feels like I finally figured it out.

I think this feeling comes from the fact that summer is never simple. Summer is never any ONE thing. Summer is everything. Summer is so good, but it is so darn far from perfect. It is great, and awful, and hard, and amazing...and we grow, and learn...but we also forget. We fail. We struggle. See, summer as a teacher or student allows us to get close to our own humanity. We get to spend time with ourselves. We have expectations and goals, some of which are manageable and others that are lofty. Yet when it's all said and done, the summer has happened and it's been SO. MANY. THINGS.

And many of them were things of the hard variety that grow us into wiser, calloused versions of ourselves.

So how does one answer, the "How was your summer?" question?

Well I decided this year to just go for it and acknowledge that my summer was a little bit of everything. As Hunter S. Thompson once remarked,

"Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain."

I have a friend who once shared with me that, in his younger years, he and his friends had adopted the phrase "the both" as a way of acknowledging that he was feeling lots of different things all at once.

"Yo, that movie was the both!"

Or, "Yeah, we broke up...but it's kind of, well, y'know...the both."

So, I decided, when asked about my summer, I'd simply hint at the reality that my summer was the both.

"It was hard and easy, amazing and impossible. Thanks for asking. How was yours?"

And by doing so, I would silently acknowledge the dreamy beautiful days I had with my family and the love for my kids and my wife that deepened and erupted...but I would also acknowledge the reality that there were tantrums and accidents and dishes that broke.

I expected that by hijacking the predicted response of my colleagues and students I'd make things suddenly awkward, but you know what happened? People opened right up.

"Yeah, you're right...me too. Summer was great and hard."

"I know what you mean...my dad is really sick right now."

"My parents are separating."

"There were so many points in my summer that were great, but I didn't do half the stuff I'd planned to."

"I'm so grateful I found a really great therapist. I couldn't have done this summer alone"

It's easy to put on a mask and forget that everyone around us is human. And by holding space for the people around me--the people I care about--I now feel better equipped to be myself. I can now get to work doing the things I'm here to do...to teach, to learn, to connect. To rely on relationships. I can fully be myself while I'm doing it, and my hope is that this feeling is contagious.

Today in English class I asked my 8th graders to identify the strongest emotion they felt over the course of the summer, then write about that moment. They didn't share what they wrote, but as I watched their faces, their eyes, in writing, I could tell that summer, for them, was also the both.