“You have just dined and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I encountered this quote while reading:
Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.

Then I was reading a terrific review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book in the NYRB where the reviewer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, cites an essay by George Orwell, Down the Mine, where he makes the following claim:

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or
indirectly dependent upon coal.

(Klinkenborg replaces coal with fossil fuels.)

Two good pieces for thinking about the costs of the decisions you make and for making the case about the necessity of a deep awareness of how things actually work. I will try the Klinkenborg with my students to see if I can get anyone excited about the possibility of reading Kolbert’s book.

Fresh chicken burgers and asparagus on the grill on a Sunday afternoon:

“Tim was so learned, that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant, he bought a cow to ride on.”

Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1750

I encountered while re-reading…
Rick Wormeli, Fair Isn’t Always Equal Assessing & Grading in the Differentiated Classroom (Portland, ME; Westerville, Ohio: Stenhouse?; National Middle School Assoc., 2006).

I woke up this morning thinking about grit and resilience and all that stuff that some kids and adults are supposed to have that enables them to overcome things no one should ever have to overcome. A word wall doesn’t make anyone less hungry and a clearly stated objective on the board doesn’t fix the heartache of dealing with an addicted parent.

But what makes a parent resilient? How do I measure my own resilience with my children? How am I fostering or forging resilience within my own children or with my students?

I’m sure some researcher is completely on top of this subject but here are some of the things I’d build into the scale:

Threats: Do I often make threats about what’s going to happen if things don’t change?

(This is something I unsuccessfully try and avoid as a parent and a teacher. When I frustrated I do this, and, worse, I don’t always follow through. There would have to be a second question about follow up)

Consistency: Do I take on specific tasks and return to them on a regular basis?

(A question to see if there are lots of ongoing issues or careful reflection about one or two that might be solvable).

Re-set: Can I have a dispute and then, as much as humanly possible, be reasoned and kind the following day?

(A question to see whether conflict lingers or whether grudges are held. Again, this is a humanity issue — it’s hard as a parent and a teacher when a kid has been particularly obnoxious, to immediately reset)

I want to think more about what such a scale can look like, a scale that measures whether you are modeling or demonstrating “grit” to your kids. Again, I’m sure someone else has already done this. And again, no amount of grit ensures that someone can survive the vast inequalities so many children contend with.

Reading The Goldfinch. It’s that good.

Two perfect sentences:

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
(p.93)

“He asked me all kinds of interesting questions, like what I’d read in literature and how middle school was different from elementary school; what was my hardest subject (Spanish) and what was my favorite historical period (I wasn’t sure, anything but Eugene Debs and the History of Labor, which we’d spent way too much time on) and what did I want to be when I grew up (no clue)–normal stuff but still it was refreshing to converse with a grown-up who seemed interested in me apart from my misfortune, not prying for information or running down a checklist of Things to Say to Troubled Kids.”
(p. 136)

Donna Tartt, Goldfinch: A Novel. (Little Brown & Company, 2013).

Two pronged thank you here:

1. To the old friend who introduced me to Bikram. Yeah, I went to try and impress you, but damn, even in the midst of the scorching summer of 1997, this was something I knew I’d come back to. Thank you.

2. To my friend who talked about a “Yoga Practice” in such a provocative way. I don’t have a running practice. I’m not mindful about it. I try and run 3-4 times a week, especially now that I’m not bike commuting, but there’s not much intention behind it. One foot in front of the other, sometimes thinking about the playlist, sometimes thinking about nothing at all.

However, when I go to Bikram, and I know I’m saying this with all the enthusiasm of a new convert, I have to be all there; my breathing has to be right or I will be the puking guy in the corner. I like the idea of having a practice, of working towards someday being able to not fall over, to be able to sit on my feet, to be able to be fully mindful through ninety minutes of exertion in 105 degrees.

Working in a space where nearly everyone voices nearly every thought they have as loudly as possible, a Yoga studio becomes a haven, where everyone quietly struggles with a common purpose, where each action is intentional. I like it. Thanks friend.

If I were teaching Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, I’d use these two passages to ask about their perceptions of immigrant life:

“For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that previous life had vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.” (pp.49-50)

In describing the preparation for Gogol’s birthday:

“As usual, his mother cooks for days beforehand, cramming the refrigerator with stacks of foil-covered trays. She makes sure to prepare his favorite things: lamb curry with lots of potatoes, lucchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese. All this is less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are allergic to milk, all of whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (Perfection Learning, 2004).