Looking Up & Going Back

There are two signs on the wall of my classroom.

Well, to be fair, there are more than two signs in my classroom, but two in particular have caught my attention in the past week. One says, "You are enough" while the other reads, "Be your best self."

I've thought about these two expressions in the past week because I believe both of them fully. I believe my students should strive to be their best. I believe they have an innate sense of what it feels like to be their best...not to achieve their best, but the be the version of themselves of which they are most proud, most satisfied, most secure. There are some days when we just feel good about who we are and how we have navigated the day. Other days pass and we feel like we've been passive participants who merely went through the motions. This is a philosophy: a principle used to guide one's practices. We aspire to be our best selves because we believe it's important.

When it comes to believing we are enough, however, it doesn't mean we're resolving to embrace the status quo and never aspire. Instead, we're adopting a mindset: an attitude with intention. If we adopt an attitude of realizing that we don't have to be anything other than what we are, we give ourselves permission to be our best selves, not as the people we wish we could be, but as the people we are. Right here. Right now. Today.

But can we simultaneously strive to be our best while also acknowledging that we already are enough? Yes. Because one has to do with our actions, while the other has to do with our identities.

There's a saying in Japanese that epitomizes the nature of wanting to be our best.

Ue ni wa ue ga aru.

It translates literally as, "Above up, there is something even higher above up."

It connects to the unattainable pursuit of being our best selves, but also recognizing that we will always see opportunities to improve.  We, humans, are ambitious.

The growth mindset of "I can get better" comes to mind here. We can be our best selves today by simply being ourselves, by caring for ourselves.

Another word, though, comes from the Ghanaian Twi language.

It's just as beautiful.

Sankofa literally means "go back and get it" and is often associated with the proverb, "Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates as "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."

Ue ni wa ue ga aru reminds us that there is always something higher, something worth reaching for, something to become...but sankofa tells of a truth buried in our pasts...it tells us that what we have done, what we have learned, is sometimes sufficient to show us where we're going. We have histories, experiences, and wisdom, and it is from our pasts that our philosophies and beliefs are formed, and from where our identities take shape.

In our futures, and our presents, though...that is the world of our mindsets, our attitudes and our intentions in each day. We must strive and struggle forward while staying tethered to that which we know is true about ourselves and the things for which we stand, the reasons we exist.

How do we do both? How do I send the message to my 8th graders as I share their trimester grades--and write paragraphs of commentary on how much I enjoy teaching them, how much potential they each have, and how they might endeavor to become the best versions of themselves--that they are enough?

I can't stand grading my students...attaching letters to their growth and progress. But I love telling them why I enjoy having them in my classroom, and the ways they inspire me.

So, how then do I remind them of sankofa, and the importance of reflecting back on the fall, on 7th grade, on their entire experience as a student, as a thinker, as a learner, as an explorer, to better understand who they are today?

How do I also remind them of Ue ni wa ue ga aru and the value of adopting a growth mindset that clamors for the clouds and pursues the impossibility of learning everything, seeking anything, and deciphering meaning in their own lives, always looking up, and out, and onwards?


I think I'll start by making two new signs for my classroom wall.

sankofa

&

Ue ni wa ue ga aru

and I'll give their curiosity the gift of that mere simplicity.

Building Bridges

Nobody inspires me quite like my mother. 

She was once a children's librarian, and I feel like her entire life is spent being a relative librarian of the world. She loves nothing more than to share the things she loves with the people she loves (and, lest you think she only shares things within a small circle of people, she loves everyone she meets. Really.).

She has started initiatives in the communities of which she is a part called Operation Cooperation and Project R.E.A.D (Ready, Excited, Able, Determined), has referred to herself on her curriculum vitae as Coordinator of J.O.Y. (Joining our Youth), and once founded her own school called Magical Youth School (MY School for short). She's amazing and awesome and a little crazy. She owns that. And it only makes her more amazing.

Yet, for anyone who has met someone like my mother--someone's whose whole existence is centered on loving and inspiring the people around her--you know that accolades and CV bylines fail to do justice to the essence of that person, to the way they make them feel.

I inherited many of my mother's traits and gifts, but also some of her foibles (being scattered, dangerously optimistic, and allowing ourselves to be pulled in a million directions at once being placed most prominently on our Mount Rushmore of flaws). And you know what? I couldn't be more grateful. For all of it.

A few years ago my mom shared a story with me. I believe the story is one engrained in the lore of Northern Vermont, but the internet has given me few indicators about where it originated. I imagine Willem Lange adopting it into his storytelling repertoire and telling it to his neighbors around a wood stove. It's the stuff of griots: wisdom as old as mountains, passed down through generations.

Here's the story:

Once upon a time, two brothers who lived on adjoining farms fell into conflict. It was the first serious rift in 40 years of farming side by side, sharing machinery, and trading labor and goods as needed without a hitch. Then the long collaboration fell apart. It began with a small misunderstanding and it grew into a major difference, and finally it exploded into an exchange of bitter words followed by weeks of silence.

One morning there was a knock on John's door. He opened it to find a man with a carpenter's toolbox. "I'm looking for a few days work" he said. "Perhaps you would have a few small jobs here and there. Could I help you?" "Yes," said the older brother. "I do have a job for you. Look across the creek at that farm. That's my neighbor, in fact, it's my younger brother. Last week there was a meadow between us and he took his bulldozer to the river levee and now there is a creek between us. Well, he may have done this to spite me, but I'll go him one better. See that pile of lumber curing by the barn? I want you to build me a fence -- an 8-foot fence -- so I won't need to see his place anymore. Cool him down, anyhow." The carpenter said, "I think I understand the situation. Show me the nails and the post-hole digger and I'll be able to do a job that pleases you."

The older brother had to go to town for supplies, so he helped the carpenter get the materials ready and then he was off for the day. The carpenter worked hard all that day measuring, sawing, nailing. About sunset when the farmer returned, the carpenter had just finished his job.

The farmer's eyes opened wide, his jaw dropped. There was no fence there at all. It was a bridge -- a bridge stretching from one side of the creek to the other! A fine piece of work -- handrails and all -- and the neighbor, his younger brother, was coming across, his hand outstretched. "You are quite a fellow to build this bridge after all I've said and done." The two brothers stood at each end of the bridge, and then they met in the middle, taking each other's hand.

They turned to see the carpenter hoist his toolbox on his shoulder. "No, wait! Stay a few days. I've a lot of other projects for you," said the older brother. "I'd love to stay on," the carpenter said, "but, I have many more bridges to build."

I am thinking of this story today because (a) my students are completing their storytelling unit over the next four weeks. As I've detailed before, they spend two weeks working with Laconia Therrio, a  master storyteller and extraordinary human being, who inspires them to believe in the power of their stories (fables and tales they've selected from cultures around the world), but also to believe in themselves as uniquely qualified to tell their stories in a way nobody else can. But (b) this story also resonates because I was up last night, and early again this morning, trying to know how to respond to yesterday's tragic school shooting in Florida. 

17 families woke up this morning without a piece of themselves, and the ripples of this pain run far deeper than the community where the horror took place.

That's reality. And it is absolutely awful. I wish it wasn't that way. Of course I do. But we live in an imperfect world. It's broken and there is pain. There always has been.

But I also believe in bridges. I believe that to escape the darkness of a moment, we have to stand together and allow ourselves to shine like stars in the blackness, in the void. It might seem hopeless, but if there was truly no GOOD in the world, no hope...then we humans would have given up long ago. We would have allowed ourselves to decompose into a brutal and ugly breed of animal. And perhaps some would argue we have. That we've already arrived at the bottom of that pit. 

But we all know what it feels like to be our best selves. We know what it feels like to feel good about ourselves, and to reach out and connect with the people around us. The world needs more bridges. It doesn't need uniformity, but it does need unity. The world needs unity.

And this is the message I will share today with my students. It's a message my mom would love. We all need to be more like librarians. We need to connect with people...we need to seek to understand them...and then, with no purpose beyond the pure joy of seeing them experience love, we need to try to find what it is that they're looking for. Most people don't know it themselves. The brother in the story above thought he needed a to build a fence...librarians like my mom know how to listen to the whisper of the world, and endeavor to inspire others by connecting with them in meaningful ways, ways that matter, that build bridges.

Whenever my mother finds something she thinks someone will love (whether a book, a piece of art, an encouraging word, a cord of seasoned firewood, or a typewriter), she gives it freely and merely asks (when applicable),

When you're done...just pass this on to the universe.

As her son, I've often mimicked this line with a sarcastic breed of filial love and admiration, but I think she's right. We need to share what we've got, what inspires us, with everyone. Let it spread across the universe.

We need to build bridges because we need to heal. And then we need to pass our healing on...to the universe.

Questions

Questions saved me

when I was young and

anxious

A condition as permanent

as skin

I would ask

and ask

and ask

Gradually I grew

to love the questions

as much as the sanctuary

between them

the creak of eaves

the inhale before

the silence just after

I have always appreciated questions. As the poem above suggests, they have provided me throughout my life with a sense of security. If I was asking, or being asked, a question, it meant there was something safe, something stimulating, something connective between me and another person.  And even the pauses between questions and answers provided me with a sense of anticipation that delighted (and continues to delight me).

This week, my students are leaning into questions through exploring "Ubi Sunt" poems (literally, "Where are [they]?" in Latin), as well as Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions and Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood.

We're looking at questions as launching points for poems, realizing that there are often poems that rest beneath the surface of our consciousness, and that sometimes all we need in order to unearth the beauty of our own understanding, our own voice, is a good question.

So here's to a week of questions--good, meaningful questions--that can take us places we didn't realize we needed to go.

Innsaei

I've been sick for seven days. Nothing humbles the human body, the human spirit, like being knocked horizontal for an extended period of time. Being away from my students has been hard, but sometimes we are granted a window into why something hard and painful happens. This week represented one of those times.

"You're the worst sick person I've ever met. You have to let yourself be weak."

That was my wife's advice. And she was right. I am awful at resting, and when I'm sick the same thing is true. I just want to accomplish something, to learn something, to be productive...but resting? For five, six, seven days? There's nothing patient or sedentary about me, so being those things and letting the world spin on in my absence is so counter to the ways I'm made.

But I did it. I stopped. I listened to myself. I was patient. I let myself heal. I also had the chance to catch up on the novel my students are reading, Purple Hibiscus. In the novel, silence plays an important role and the inner minds of the characters play a prominent, albeit mysterious, role. As I read about silence as a character, I also invited silence into my own week...instead of becoming annoyed by silence, scared of silence, and avoiding it at all costs.

I found silence.

During my time away, my students were viewing the feature film, Invictus. The movie tells the story of Nelson Mandela's relationship with the South African Springbok national rugby team in 1995.

When I returned to school, my students were almost done with the film. They expressed amazement at Mandela's strength of spirit, spending 27 years in prison on Robben Island prior to being elected president. Then, instead of harboring resentment, the man united the nation, pulling his captors into the deep embrace of humanity.

But 27 years? 

Talk about silence.

The title of the film draws its name from the Victorian poem by William Ernest Henley. In the last stanza, Henley writes,

It matters not how strait the gate, 

      How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate, 

      I am the captain of my soul.

No matter how ugly things get, there is something beneath--something inside of us--that can rise up. My students saw this as they watched the film; they realized that there is something in our souls that is divorced from external events. There is something within that is deeper and stronger than our circumstances.

When I remarked that, "You can't choose the story you're in, but you CAN choose which character you are in the story!" one student jumped out of her seat, "OMG, that's so good--I'm writing it down!"

 I had to laugh to myself. It might have been good, but at the end of the day, it was wisdom. Nobody responds, "OMG, that's so good--I'm writing it down!" when they hear a good fact or when they're downloading information during a lecture. Kids want to grow, they want to change.

The trailer for the incredible film, Innsaei : the power of intuition includes the following sentence: "Wisdom has been replaced by knowledge, and knowledge has been replaced by information."

My student had just internalized a morsel of wisdom, but it hit her as a Eureka moment. She knew she needed it, but she is so hardwired by society to consume information instead of to sit and patiently wait for the world to deliver a piece of wisdom.

Back to that word, "innsaei," though. It's an Icelandic word that means intuition. But in Iceland, it has many meanings. It can mean, "the sea within," which refers to the borderless nature of our inner world, a constantly moving world of vision, feelings, and imagination beyond words.

Isn't that awesome?

And we can't get there--to that sea within--without silence, without finding peace, without unplugging, without slowing down. Sometimes we need stillness to reflect.

So I began by writing that sometimes we are granted a window into why something hard and painful happens. I don't know if Nelson Mandela realized why he spent 27 years on Robben Island, but I imagine he wouldn't have been the leader he was without it. South Africa needed him to experience that to understand his role as leader of a family of 43 million.

I know that being sick forced me to be weak, and to slow down, and to stop running, and to reflect.

But it also allowed my students to have a substitute teacher. And to watch a movie. And to have the tides of their inner seas churned a little bit. And that substitute teacher? She's amazing. And I think I had to be gone so she could be there, and so they could be there with her. Because when the movie ended, she walked to the front of the classroom, and with tears in her eyes, she addressed the class.

"I want to tell you that I am from Venezuela. And this movie made me realize what my country needs. We need a leader like that...we need somebody to unite us..."

She went on, but what she said is lost to me because I wasn't there. But my students were. 

They were watching her tears, listening to her voice, basking in the silence of her Innsaei.

Innsaei

Getting where we're going

Maps are dominating my 8th grade world cultures classroom this week. Conversations about maps, about what they look like, what they can do, how they can be...how they can change us and the ways we think and understand and relate to each other.

The world of maps is a world of transforming possibilities. Maps help us navigate, but they can also be abstractions, diagrams of relationships, or interactions over times.

Maps can reveal how diseases spread, how plants and animals form food chains within an ecosystem, how society evolves as a result of correlating sets of data, delivered on maps. One of my favorite TED talks is Amy Robinson Sterling's 2013 talk about mapping the brain.

Maps are awesome and we've been looking at Gapminder, the CIA World Factbook this week as we all try to make sense of cultural, social, political, and geographic transformations, struggles, successes, and opportunities on the continent of Africa.

The best moments, though, have occurred when my students get out from behind their maps, detatch themselves from pages of data, and connect with each other. They lean into the work of their peers and become overtaken by moments of "Whoa, that's so cool!" and "Your maps are so awesome!"  and "Hey, did you see ----------'s maps yet? Their correlations are CRAZY!" They are looking for correlations, but they're also looking for connections.

They are adolescents. They are academics. But they are also undeniably human animals who crave interaction with one another.

I asked them as they left class the other day, "Who's not having fun with their data? Who is frustrated?" 

A few hands went up.

"That's okay! Share what you're looking at with your classmates in study hall today; if you're still frustrated in the morning, come find me and we can make sure we find some fun in it together!"

It wasn't about me. It wasn't about them. It was about us. About the connections, and about being frustrated...frustrated alongside each other. Because when we invite others into our frustration, our trials, we aren't alone any more.

Doesn't that kind of make us like road maps? Aren't we networks of spiraling connections between things?

Some days we're zooming on interstates, connecting with gobs of other off ramps and roundabouts, brimming with ideas, going somewhere.

Other days we're one lane dirt roads through the forest...we're going slow, taking our time, wandering, rambling through the day.

But what about the days that are parkways or bi-ways or alleys or cul-de-sacs? What of the dead ends, the bridges, the toll plazas, the one-way streets? 

There are purposes for all these things, but I think the key is that we don't always stay in our own cars. We need to carpool; we need to take public transportation; we need to drive; but we also need to be passengers. 

And sometimes we have to walk.

How are you getting where you need to go today?

Being Great vs. Being Good

This week has found my students looking at life through the perspective of a journalist. I've asked them to seek out stories worth telling; stories that might not be headline-grabbing on the surface, but that--with a bit of investigation--might yield some morsel of interest and societal value. The stories that inspire and uplift are the stories they're seeking.

Most news stories, my thoughtful students noted, tend focus on emotions. Whether the emotions are fear, anger, sadness, or some element of human desire, my students recognize that the media likes to sensationalize and polarize.

But my students? They're focusing this week on finding GOOD in the world around them and seeking out human stories that make them feel inspired and compelled to do good, themselves.

It's no accident that this exercise is taking place around Martin Luther King, Jr.'s weekend: he is a man whose legacy has been gilded with grandeur. We've also continued reading Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and my students are struggling to define what, exactly, makes a person GREAT. Is it their deeds or their heart?

"Can you be great and flawed?" they ask.
"Well, aren't we all flawed?" another student suggests.
"Can't you stay dignified and humble, though, even in the midst of your flaws?"
"Is being great the same thing as being good?"

These are the questions my students are asking each other. They're really good. The students and the questions.
One student struck me when they remarked,

"Isn't goodness about thinking about others, but greatness [comes from] thinking about yourself?"

Wow. I'm not sure whether I agree (I simply need more time to digest it), but I love the question. I love the sentiment. I love the way my brilliant, beautiful-minded students are dissecting the ways history has defined great men and women, and they are questioning, questioning, questioning the merits of that greatness...always.

Robert Hutchins once had this to say about education:
"Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible."   

My students are thinking straight, inflaming their intellects, widening their horizons...and, throughout it all, they are unsettling my mind.

They are good.
And I think that's great.

On Memories

"What are you doing today that is worthy of a memory?"

Each week a local Rabbi asks himself this question. It is one of a list of five that is posted to his refrigerator and this morning I asked it of my students. We are in the midst of reading Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie, and many of the memories the 13 year-old protagonist narrator, Kambili, shares are negative.

We create many memories in our lives, but we also neglect to remember things. Some of the memories we recall are positive, while others are not. Some are reignited by smells, songs, places, or people...but they are mysterious. And memories fade. 

But what if we approached each day with a goal of creating a memory, either for ourselves or for someone else? What if our goal was to make memory positive? What if we tried to live in such a way that was worthy of creating positive memories for those around us?

My students acknowledged that their memories of second grade were littered with embarrassment, joy, and humor...but that they really only had five or six STRONG memories. As someone more than twice the age of my students, I have even fewer. Yet where do these memories go? How do we make them stay?

My students went on to discuss how we can make negative memories that will likely stay with us forever ("If I make a bad decision," said one student, "I'll probably remember it, whether I'm found out or not...the emotion will just be that strong."). But taking the time to speak into someone's life, to compliment someone, or to go out of one's way to touch the life of another (even if it's a note thanking the postal worker for delivering your mail each day), could be lifelong. My students understood this, underSTAND this...and the timing with a weekend celebrating Dr. King's beautiful dream feels fitting.

I still remember the autumn day I went for a run as a fourteen year old and encountered an elderly man whose truck had died at the edge of a logging road where he'd been hunting. I stopped and asked how I could help. This was in the day before cell phones, so he confessed that he'd probably just walk four miles home and return with his wife and their second car to jumpstart the vehicle. Unabashedly optimistic, I suggested that I run and tell her about the predicament instead. The man gave me directions and I took off at a quick trot. I had never run more than three miles in my life, but ran over eight that day. I will never forget the way it felt to fall asleep that night, tired in body and full in spirit.

Those are the memories we have control over...we don't need Thursdays to dissolve into Fridays, or winter to slowly become spring...opportunities to make today memorable in the future history of our lives are everywhere. We won't remember every day of our lives, but we can do our best to ensure that somebody does. We can be important, nameless characters in other people's stories, too. As teachers, this isn't just a possibility, it's a responsibility.

Sapiens

I am sitting in my living room. I watch hot steam curl from my coffee mug into the dark. A sliver of pink glances against the horizon outside my window. 

A new dawn.

It always takes me a while to settle into a routine away from school. I am just so driven during the school year. Driven by my love of learning, by my perfectionism, by my desire to do EVERYTHING, by my students, by my colleagues. I just never stop. (Every day I'm hustlin').

But here I am, embracing the stillness of dawn.

Since break began six days ago I've been working my way through Noah Yuval Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book highlights so many of the complicated (and in many cases downright coincidental) origins of how and why we are the way we are as humans. 

One of the most stirring realizations I've had is that we aren't meant to be so overwhelmed. It's just not the way we were originally made. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for example, actually didn't work all that much. The common misperception is that they spent all day, backs to the sun, gathering and hunting all in the effort to survive. Really, though, they were communal and differed from their neanderthal cousins because of their propensity for storytelling and imagining. Yet it was that very trait (imagination) that allowed them to become so complicated, to develop social hierarchies based upon social imaginaries, and to care deeply about invisible things like numbers.

And here I am, knocking on the door of the year 2018 C.E. This is the present tense of our history as humans, and out there somewhere my students are living their lives and loving the people around them. Sure, there are things that are stressing them out and things that are making them more busy than they'd like, but I hope--like me--they are finding time to sit and be still. Finding time to merely exist. Because many of us have the convenience and privilege to not have to worry about survival...we can take time to reflect and imagine and to turn off our devices and wait for something, anything (a drawing, a poem, a recipe, a game, a conversation, a cuddle with a pet, a walk in the cold) to draw us in and to serve as a catalyst for a new idea that's never existed.

Our lives are written in the present tense, but we make it so complicated. We've got these beautiful sapien brains that can create so much. Here are the two results of our human imagination that have inspired me most in the past week (this and this other one). It makes me think of the wonderful line penned by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: 

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

Here's to our collective potential as humankind. Let's slow down and let our imaginations run.

The things we build

Far too often, school exists as a fait accompli. A thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it. 

Students complete assignments assigned by teachers.

But what else in life operates in this way? We get to respond and engage with nearly everything else that comes our way and the learning we undertake in life is so often self-directed and driven by our own interests and engagement. 

So it was with this in mind that I approached this week's assignments for my students. 

Today I shared with them an idea I've had to create a "Periodic Table of Religion." They're in the midst of learning about the Periodic Table of Elements in Science, so I figured I'd tap into their expertise and gauge what a religious table might look like.

They quickly taught me about the characteristics of the elemental table ("What is its function?" I asked.)

Okay, I thought. So, then, how could we apply the functionality of this table to one about religion? How could it be useful to us? They quickly got to work brainstorming the types of information that could be valuable in a Periodic Table of Religion.

See, this is the thing. My students had a better list of ideas than I ever could have developed on my own. I had the idea, but instead of framing it as an assignment (fait accompli), I allowed my students to play a role in the vision. I can't wait to see what they do with it.

I've been thinking about how my students apply their own learning to the world around them lately. I've been considering what types of jobs they might someday have and how the ways they think (and are allowed to think) in school are preparing them. As such, three of my current students and I are writing an article about buildings. We're looking at a current building project on our campus (a new dining hall) and asking, "How is building a dining hall like writing an 8th grade essay?"

We understand the steps in crafting an essay:

1. Process
1. Choose a topic
2. Research
3. Outline
4. Rough Draft
5. Edit
6. Proofread
7. Final Draft
8. Revise (Revised final draft → the “polishing” stage)
9. Publish

When buildings are finished, they represent a fait accompli. Yet, in How Buildings Learn, author Stewart Brand notes,

Papers are constantly building and rebuilding until...well...they aren't. But the interpretations continue. As we read (and re-read!) our favorite books, don't we glean new meaning? Aren't poems and plays and speeches crystalline, as Brand suggests buildings can be in their uses and function?

So, I wonder, as I close in on my 30 minutes of reflection, how our learning might be like this. My students learned about the Periodic Table of Elements from their Science teacher...but how does that apply to the rest of their lives? How does it change the way they think about order and organization? How can the measuring of stuff be shifted and tilted and applied to something totally divergent?

Even though some assignments feel static (like my students' vocabulary quiz tomorrow), their use of the words is fluid, crystalline.

Their learning exists simultaneously in the past, present, and future tenses of their lives' stories.

Perhaps, then, building isn't the right way to think about my students...I am not building them, nor are they building themselves.

Our dining hall and our essays will one day be finished (or...abandoned?) and sent out into the world to be used and appreciated. But my students are building something that is both built and grown. It is both innate and extrinsic.