Category Archives: Uncategorized

The only work that matters, goes away. And only that which goes away, will stay. This is the nut of my weekend, when I returned after more than thirty years to my elementary and junior high schools in upstate New York. My son’s college visits took me there for the first time since we movedContinue reading “down to the bones”

5:00 AM on the first day of school and I can’t sleep. Some things never change. Even after a life in school, the night before the new year starts is different. It’s all possibility, all the way down. Everyone has an A, even me. All of the stories wait to be told again…or left inContinue reading “blessed unrest”

For Natalia Kormeluk, master teacher, on the occasion of her retirement – and the rest of the extraordinary faculty of The Field School. Probably two dozen on the way into campus from our house in the country, every day. Some still red but most bleached and desiccated, landlocked driftwood ships whose joints are giving way. LeftContinue reading “barns”

Well, I’m once again on the backside of a tremendous spring musical directed by the real-deal life-changing music and drama educators at Watauga High School, and once again thinking about why the arts experiences our students have in our schools matter So. Darn. Much. This time, I got zinged by the traditional closing-night moment afterContinue reading “knuckleheads”

That’s the hefty title of a chapter I’ve got in the terrific new book Apocalyptic Leadership in Education, edited by my colleague Vachel Miller and just published by Information Age Publishing. It draws heavily on some ideas about films  (Winter’s Bone, Pacific Rim, Let the Right One In) that I worked out on this blog overContinue reading “Scheherazade and the Axe: Narrative Medicine, the Apocalypse, and the Way Through”

Mark Lilla’s New York Times op-ed on “The End of Identity Liberalism” is good on the tactical limits of identity politics (“the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan”). I also find him correct on the urgent need for all Americans to accept both the responsibilities and the rights of participatingContinue reading “identity now, identity tomorrow, identity forever”

I’ve nothing to say about the election this morning. But I do have something to say – and down deep, that’s all it’s about, terrifyingly. I’ve been rereading Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me as I teach it. A book about so much – but this time for me, it’s a book about education.Continue reading “how thin the needle”

What are you waiting on? I have been considering this question off and on for the last weeks. The near cause is our toddler, whose waking schedule has been unpredictable. My usual morning habit (“coffee and contemplation”, as Stranger Things taught us) isn’t usual anymore, because whatever I am doing in the morning, I amContinue reading “waiting on a friend”

We finished Stranger Things last night, and my usual post-watch research uncovered dedicated articles that sought to catalog its many, many references to horror and sci-fi films of the late 70s and early 80s. I was surprised that I’d seen all of them, and that I saw most within a few years of their release. TheContinue reading “familiar things”

Another May. Collared shirts, once under polyester sport coats and now under polyester regalia, too hot. Lawn parties, everyone trying to say things all at once they thought they’d have a lot longer to say but now the car is idling, time to go. That sickening feeling of dislocation: everything is changing, right now, packingContinue reading “commencement”