A thousand-mile year
Goal for the year was 1,800 miles or 150 miles a month. I’ll have to pick up the pace slightly.
0731 Walk and Photos
National Mutt Day
Silas Marner
Finished this, vaguely weepy, in the 52nd Street branch today.
Start with this one:
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward, and the hand may be a little child’s.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. (Portland: Mint Editions, 2021), 127.
Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities
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.
Not a groundhog
Trying to re-locate the gopher/groundhog that insists of showing up every five to six days and eating all the leaves off of everything. Instead, this young ‘un wandered into the trap and wanted no part of leaving. The brick was holding it open. It could leave at any time.
Can’t stop thinking about Cathy Ann and SNL: possums only got two moves. They hiss and then play dead.
Church Sign of the Day
Stuff
If I were a real photographer, I’d blow these two photos up next to each other. They’re from back to back days in July; one was taken outside a Junkyard on Grays Ave. The other is a pair of frames found on Powelton Ave this morning. One represents the junk we buy and then throw out. The other captures the stuff we save — this human was on-time to school during the 1954 school year and seventy years later the framed certificate was on a street corner in West Philly.
Thursday Three Mile
