Where anything is growing, one former is worth a thousand re-formers.

Fan of Greil Marcus…re-reading the Basement Tapes book and found this quote from Harry Smith (the assembler of the Anthology of American Folk Music):

“When I was younger, I thought that the feelings that went through me were — that I would outgrow them, that the anxiety or panic or whatever it is called would disappear, but you sort of suspect it at thirty-five, and when you get to be fifty you definitely know you’re stuck with your neuroses, or whatever you want to classify them as–demons, completed ceremonies, any old damn thing.”

Soothing on a Friday when one’s book manuscript seems miles from completion.

“Caught in the limited milieu of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures—rational and irrational—of which their lives are a subordinate part. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve.”

will post full citation later.

“You really cannot have educators running major school systems. They’re simply not trained.”

Wilgoren, J. (1999, December 26). Now Seeking a Superhero. New York Times, p. 1.

“The voices of teachers, the questions and problems they pose, the frameworks they use to interpret and improve their practice, and the ways they define and understand their work lives are absent from the literature of teaching.”

My, how times have changed.

“I can conceive of no higher praise for a writer than to be able to speak in the same tone to savants and schoolboys alike, but so noble a simplicity is the privilege of the select few.”

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), 3.

My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.

I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that I might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

“The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.”

“The child is the starting-point, the center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal>

Child and the Curriculum

This description of a principal of a school in Newark is spot-on for leadership in troubled public schools:

“He’s not the Joe Clark kind of tough… He doesn’t strong-arm kids. He knows that you have to show them that you care about them and won’t give up on them, and every kid, no matter how big, wants to feel safe. Then you just have to be consistent.”

That’s it.