But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

“That depends,” said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. “You must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and learning to do it well, and not be always saying there’s this and there’s that — if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is, I wouldn’t give two pence for him” — here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers “whether he was the prime-minister or the rick-thatcher if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.”

(p.527 from the 2015 Penguin edition.)

King, Stephen. Stephen King on Writing. NY: Scribner, 2000.

Pennington, Michael. Hamlet: A User’s Guide. 1st Limelight ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.

Loved Pennington’s book…so helpful.

“Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.”

“Oh, I have an easy life–by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for and never really doing it.”

Mary, early in book.

There’s a set of questions here, though: what happens if what you got into teaching to do diverges dramatically from what your school is asking you to do?

What if the kind of teaching you’re asked to do does not allow your mind to wander?

What happens when you want to create transformative experiences for your students and instead you’re being asked to drain their souls?

Eliot, George, and Ronjaunee Chatterjee. Middlemarch: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contemporary Reactions, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2024.

I liked this book a lot. One of the things I was thinking about as I was walking this morning was this passage, a passage that would be a great discussion generator in class:

The one central truth that liberals know is that the effective reform almost never happens as the result of big ideas sweeping through the world and revolutionizing life. Whenever we look at how the big problems got solved, it was rarely a big idea that solved them. It was the intercession of a thousand small sanities. A thousand small sanities are usually wiser than one big idea.

This is completely true in education. Maybe I’m old, or maybe I’m jaded, but big ideas mean nothing next to the thoughtful classroom practice where each day you go, and, in a thousand small gestures, actions, decisions, and sanities, make your classroom a place where good things happen.

This was one of those books where I took many pictures of various passages. I’ll keep posting them here.

Gopnik, Adam. A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Miss Mills, replied, on general principles, that the Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendor, and that where love was, all was.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. (London: Penguin Books, 2021. )