“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. )

There’s another scene from this 1973 novel that I’ll type up tomorrow. Meanwhile:

You think people was meaner then they are now? the deputy said.

The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day Gad first made one.

McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. New York: Random House, 1973.

Cookbooks and books on food. Ugh.

Maybe I’ll put this quote from her new book under every shot I take of the sun coming up over the city.

“This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt — as an essay is an attempt (and this is an essay) — to locate meaning between the irretrievable past and the equally unfathomable now.” (125)

Hampl, Patricia. The Art of the Wasted Day. New York: Viking Press, 2018.

Three excerpts from her short stories below:

Two descriptions of reading these stories:

1. Like you’re walking downtown, and a human you don’t know is humming a song you know, a song you know well, in fact a song of your childhood, a song maybe you thought was only yours, and you lean in to hear more, and as you do so the human pokes you in eye.
2. That compromise you made, somewhere in your life, the one you thought well, this is the best I can do right now, or I’ll give I have to live with this, or (ugh) it is what is? She was there, taking notes, so that someday you’ll read one of her short stories, put it down, and you get to feel bad all over again.

Could not recommend these stories more.