Posts tagged ‘philosophy’

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July 7, 2014

“To Develop” Sounds Like Too Much Work

by lisa st john

de·vel·op : verb\di-ˈvel-əp, dē-\

: to cause (something) to grow or become bigger or more advanced
: to create (something) over a period of time
: to work out the possibilities of <develop an idea>

My frustration with the writing process mounts. I need a little brain stretch break.

Me: “How does my character develop? What is her journey? What will happen to her?”

Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”

 

I just realized what I want to be when I grow up (I know I am already a teacher, and I know I love my job, but let’s just say I had another life to fill up). Then I want to be Gertrude Stein. I want to be alone all day and write (except for the occasional cafe lunch) and then just have people over almost every night. We will drink and talk and smoke cigars and play Cards Against Humanity. We will ask metaphysical questions and come up with drunken ideas half-formed by moonlight.

 

We will bow to the power of repetition and we will argue until the moonlight is gone. Wait. Does this mean I need an Alice? Will I have to write her autobiography?

 

I prefer Stein’s portraits. I used to try and write them back in the day, but it just wasn’t my style. Her poem, “If I Told Him,” about Picasso tickles my brain nicely. And a tickle develops into a tangent who introduces her to an idiom. Then she starts running around with some nasty verb, and before I know it a damn plot is born.

 

Develop. Sigh. I guess it IS a verb after all.

 

I want to gently submerge the blank page into a tray of Dektol. I will make sure the red light is on. I will rock the page in the tray until the page is covered evenly. I will watch the page and reduce its ephemeral salty thoughts until only the metallic words are left. Just like magic. But magic takes work. Clarke’s Third Law says so. So. I will stop whining and wishing and keep working and see what happens. I just wish Hemingway would stop by.

Here is to having the eggs to “caress and address” our muse.

“When I said. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”
–Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” Lectures in America

 

 

 

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July 1, 2014

No Time for Advertisements

by lisa st john

daisy

 

“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?”

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot

 

Dear Reader (Wait. Weird how Jane Austen that sounded.):

I promise to never put floating hypertext ads on my blog. If you click on one of my links it’s because, like me, you are interested in tangents and are willing to play in the world of hypertext reading theory.

Delany and Landow define hypertext as, “the use of the computer to transcend the linear, bounded and fixed qualities of the traditional written text.” Wow. I like the hyperbole of “transcending” anything linear. Anyway…

 

Time. How to act for the next few weeks when my world is not measured by the clock? I look at the LED and 8:30 seems a reasonable time to get up. I switch the coffee maker from Auto-On to Brew. She’ll stay that way for awhile. I’ll check the weather. Humid. Yeah, well, it is June in upstate New York. Sun and clouds. Really? They are both going to be up there today. Okay. In Arizona, I rarely checked the weather. How many synonyms are there for hot, really hot, and treacherously hot?

 

So. I will check my email. Yawn. I could pay some bills. Yuck. The computer tells me it is 8:56, but the numbers have lost their meaning.

 

“I gave the kids a ten minute warning.”

“But…”

“It’s okay. They have no idea how long ten minutes is. It could be five minutes or half an hour.”

 

Ten minutes waiting for a bus in the rain is a long ten minutes. Ten minutes before the betting windows close is a just-enough ten minutes. Ten minutes of lounging in the sand watching the waves is far too short.

 

But if Einstein is right, why can’t I play with time dilation; why can’t I choose to see the future rather than the past?

 

Kindergarteners learn to “tell” time (much too early in my humble opinion). The only way to explain time to my son when he was five was to tell him that time wasn’t real. Then he got it. “Philosophers like McTaggart who claim that time is unreal are aware of the seemingly paradoxical nature of their claim. They generally take the line that all appearances suggesting that there is a temporal order to things are somehow illusory.” What’s wrong with a little paradox?

 

Composer Jonathan Berger claims that music can, “hijack our perception of time.” Schubert knew, before science did, that time is based on perception. The logical conclusion here is that artists like Schubert can manipulate time. So what time is it?

 

Wait. There’s a cat, a hammock, and a book. That’s three. The time is three today.

 

“Always in motion is the future.”

Yoda, Star Wars Episode V:The Empire Strikes Back

 

 

 

 

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June 29, 2014

Applause, Applause!

by lisa st john

Image

ap·plaud: verb \ə-ˈplȯd\

: to strike the hands together over and over to show approval or praise

: to express approval of or support for (something or someone)

 

Othello, this year’s headliner for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at Boscobel, was, as always, beautifully tragic. The evil Iago (in love with his general) remains a master of deception. After “honest” Iago gets Cassio drunk, Cassio laments his lost reputation and states, “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleas-ance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!” Yes, Cassio, people drink and lose their minds and “party until we’re like animals.” It’s just the way we are. But “applause?” What an odd concept if you think about it. Why does clapping our hands together signify praise?

 

Not knowing the history of applause does not stop us from using it, however. At our high school’s graduation ceremony this past Friday, an interesting student asked this very question. Why do we do it? As the graduates walked past, we (the faculty) applauded them. As the graduates came up one by one we applauded. “When we applaud a performer,” argues the sociobiologist Desmond Morris, “we are, in effect, patting him on the back from a distance.” This makes sense. I do pat every single kid on the back who manages to graduate high school. It’s not the difficulty of the grades or classes that makes me say this. It’s the difficulty of surviving teenager-ness in tact (at least partially). From what I have seen in only 18 years of teaching, teens are experts at survival. I applaud the 80% of American teenagers who make it. That’s right. 20% do not. The numbers sound vague, at least to me. I am not a number person, so what does 18 years mean? What IS 20%?

 

  • According to an article in Smithsonian magazine, an estimated 20 percent of people are “especially delicious” to mosquitoes.
  • 20% of people in the Midwest have bed bugs.
  • Pareto’s Theory involves an important 20%. “The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto’s case it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. … Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world. Google does a great job with 80/20. Their engineers “are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it.”
  • One in five is the same as 20% so,
    • 1 in 5 people would have sex with a robot.
    • 1 in 5 road accidents in Sweden involve an elk.
    • 1 in 5 American children have a mental health problem.
    • 1 in 5 children in 37 states live in a “food insecure” household.
    • A woman’s chance of being raped in the United States is 1 in 5.

 

Numbers and emotions are oddly intertwined. “…tens of thousands of children die every day around the world from common causes such as malnutrition or disease” Not feeling much, right? We need comparisons.“That’s roughly the same as a hundred exploding jumbo jets full of children every single day.” Now that is heart-wrenching. But make it even smaller and it’s real in a way that large numbers are not real. “At the age which most children begin to communicate, Franciso Santoyo’s parents discovered he was deaf and losing his eyesight quickly.”

 

“We cannot feel bad about not caring as much about the ‘tens of thousands of children’” as we do for Francisco. As K.C.Cole states in her revelatory book, The Universe and the Teacup, “It’s just the way our minds work.”

 

But rather than condemn ourselves for not empathizing with large numbers, I applaud us for caring at all. Bravo to the teenagers who graduated. Bravo to Chive Charities. Bravo to all the artists who create and share. And I applaud Whitman for knowing all of this so many years ago.

 

“The Learn’d Astronomer”

 

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

         5

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.


“In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.” Judy Garland

 

 

 

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June 25, 2014

Signs

by lisa st john

 

Wrong-Way-Go-Back-Sign-K-7425

Sign : something (such as an action or event) which shows that something else exists, is true, or will happen.

If only I had seen this sign before I got married at 17. Or if someone had shown it to me before I said, “yes” on so many other bizarre occasions. Oh well. They probably did show me. I probably did see a sign. I just ignored it. I don’t think we are meant to pay attention to most signs.

If a sign’s purpose is to show that “something else exists” then isn’t everything a sign? It’s like language. There is no understanding without metaphor—comparison. Semantics demands it. This science of signs is based on the fact that, “everything is created from the interaction of three things: real objects, signs and interpretations of signs” (Pierce qtd. Carreira). This is reality.

 

DANGER! MEN IN TREES

Out here in the country, this was a common sign before the more politically correct versions came out. While we should very well be afraid of men in trees, I think the actual meaning was more like, “watch out for the construction/tree trimming going on up ahead.” If we really want to get particular, then we must realize that, “Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon something else” (Carreira in the fantastic website called Philosophy is Not a Luxury: dedicated to the profound utility of questioning reality).

 

This is why obvious signs baffle me. “Do not iron while wearing shirt.” Really?

 

Then again, if a sign’s purpose is to show that “something is true” what about the foolishness of predictability and superstition? I tripped as I left the porch. A sure “sign” that I should have stayed home. A crop circle sign? Proof of aliens or bored humans with tractors and lasers? If a sign’s purpose is to show that “something will happen” then I better start reading my horoscope. Apparently I am a Virgo but in other cultures I am a snake. So I am a “virgin” who has the “sensual art of seduction down.” M-kay.

 

The only thing without a sign is Zero. How magical is mathematics? Our friend Wikipedia states that, “In mathematics, the concept of sign originates from the property of every non-zero real number to be positive or negative. Zero itself is signless…The number zero is neither positive nor negative, and therefore has no sign. In arithmetic, +0 and −0 both denote the same number 0, which is the additive inverse of itself.”

 

Poetry!

 

The true irony rests in the phrase “Sign of the Times” which can either be the biblical nonsense or the name of an interesting website that purports to be an “experiment” that arranges news items in relation to quantum physics.

 

In a world where, “More people believe in angels and the devil than believe in the theory of evolution” methinks we have a problem actually seeing signs.

 

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

Paulo Coelho

 

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January 20, 2014

Mysteries

by lisa st john

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all

true art and science. –Albert Einstein

The massage therapist has little hands coming out of the wall on which to hang clothes. There is a ceramic hand—palm up—on her desk where she keeps her business cards. There is a smoldering hand holding incense and a pair of hands holding up books. I am so grateful that urologists and gynecologists do not decorate their offices this way. I don’t know if I want to hang my bra on a penis or take a business card out of a vagina. Odd the things that make up functional art.

Mystery machine cartoon version

And are artful functions the same thing? How long did it take us to put wheels on coolers or cup holders on strollers? A mystery.

Art and science, fact and fiction, truth and belief. These dichotomies keep me up at night1.

Other functional mysteries raise the following questions: Why don’t all winter cars come with retractable plows? We use liquid helium (at a temperature of NEGATIVE 452.4 Fahrenheit) to cool the superconductivity of a magnetic field in order to see inside the brain, but we haven’t figured out how to see if I have cervical cancer other than a (frighteningly medieval) speculum?

Sad mysteries include the fact (yes, a mystery can also be a fact—hence my confused brain activity) that over 60% of African elephants were slaughtered from poaching between 2002 and 2011 and China accounts for nearly half of that population killed each year. Apparently, however, we need to strengthen our economic relations with them.

A true mystery is why even after all the scientific proof says that homeopathy is a scam, the United States alone spends 34 BILLION dollars on alternative medicine. Tim Minchin’s lovely, animated diatribe on this subject is certainly worth watching.

An exciting mystery is that both light and matter can be either (OR BOTH) waves or particles. WTF squared, that’s what I think about that.

Some Hollywood mysteries that never occur in real life (yet I am fond of) are listed below.

I want:
… an envelope delivered to my table at an outdoor cafe that has a ringing cell phone inside of it.
… to get stuck in an elevator for hours at a time alone with some hottie.

… to jump through a large glass window and roll out onto the sidewalk.

… to beat the shit out of someone trying to attack me (preferably kicking a weapon out of his hands in the process).

And finally, should we not leave the artistic mystery of the creative process alone and just let it (like the poem it produces) “not mean, but be?” More on ars poetica and sifting through the currently trendy quantification of artistic genius another time.

p.s.: Is it any wonder that Scooby-Doo was my favorite cartoon? It was always the guy in a mask–real monsters don’t exist.

1Not literally; I sleep like a rock thanks to the miracle of chemistry. These ideas do, however, keep my mind alive at inopportune times.

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January 3, 2014

Wonder

by lisa st john

pawsWonder: n.

1.a. One that arouses awe, astonishment, surprise, or admiration; a marvel: “The decision of one age or country is a wonder to another” (John Stuart Mill).b. The emotion aroused by something awe-inspiring, astounding, or marvelous: gazed with wonder at the northern lights. 2. An event inexplicable by the laws of nature; a miracle. 3. A feeling of puzzlement or doubt. 4. often Wonder A monumental human creation regarded with awe, especially one of seven monuments of the ancient world that appeared on various lists of late antiquity.

“How wonderless your life must be,” he said.

Really? Wonderless isn’t even a word, although I don’t mind the occasional neologism. Like Abby says, “All words are made up words.” Just because I do not believe in conspiracy theories or alien crop circles—and instead believe in the gullibility of human beings—does not mean I live without wonder.

I find wonder in the chemistry of snowflakes. I find wonder in the fact that stars are kept together by their own gravity.

Just because I know homeopathy is a hoax doesn’t mean I do not acknowledge that most medicine originates with plants. Just because I know astrology is a load of crap doesn’t mean that I am not in awe of the fact that our little galaxy is but one in billions of galaxies.

There is peace in scientific fact. There is beauty in knowledge.

I get what Whitman was saying in the Learn’d Astronomer but in this fascinating century there is also mystery in the truth.

 Wondrous Truth List #1 (correspondent, coherent, pragmatic—up for debate)

-There is no color without light.

-Humans are the only animals who cry for emotional reasons.

-The desert blooms.

-We still listen to, and play (see James Rhodes ) the music Rachmaninov wrote when he was a teenager over 100 years ago.

–Pi as far as we know, is still infinite.

-There are more than 55,000 art museums in the world.

-The singularity is an actual possibility.

-We are still discovering new creatures.

–Love exists.

-Poetry continues.

rose

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December 24, 2013

Hearts

by lisa st john

Religious faith . . . erodes compassion. Thoughts like, “this might be all part of God’s plan,” or “there are no accidents in life,” . . . these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break . . . .” –Sam Harris

“Write soon and let me know how your heart is,” she wrote on the Christmas card.

 

“How is your heart?” someone else asked.

“When I had that panic attack and got sent to the hospital, the E.K.G. I had was –“

“No, no. Your HEART,” she said, holding her hand over her breast like she was pledging.

 

 

I don’t know how my heart (anatomical or otherwise) is … or isn’t. ? “BEING: That which exists, or is real (unchanging reality). Gotta love the “or” in this definition.

The problem with living in my head* is that I know my mate is gone. This knowledge, however, does not do much for my heart.

The problem with being a skeptic (sane-ish person) is that I cannot pretend to believe in spirits or ghosts or messages from beyond. Not that my love would send me a message—it was more Kent’s style to write it on a bar napkin and send it in a bottle. And even though I know the Coriolis Effect does not change the direction in which water drains in the northern versus the southern hemisphere, I still feel like I am going the wrong way around the earth—always just missing the spot that tells me where I am.

The problem with technology is that I could hear him again on Around the World Radio and I just don’t have the eggs to do it…yet.

The problem with being alone is that I am not. I am just without.

 

*“There’s something curious about professors . . . they live in their heads.” -Sir Ken Robinson

 

“A Short Poem for My Heart”

I will take irony over cruelty,
and I will bear the heartbeat of remembering you always.

But I am old again, and
halos around the moon used to be beauty—not clouds.

I could stir this into something other than a restlessness,
but I am no chef. 

I will make mounds of my sorrow and hide them in plain sight.

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April 14, 2013

Advice?

by lisa st john

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” –Erica Jong

“Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.” –Eleanor Roosevelt

Picked up a notebook the other day. It was from 1996. Three widows born in a plane crash moment. The quote from A was, “I don’t know what I need; I’ve never been a widow before.” Then I remembered what B said when we first met her all those years ago. Her husband had recently died and here she was at a scoring conference. “Get yourselves some girlfriends is all I can say. The two of us did everything together—everything. Get yourselves some girlfriends.” More recently I have heard enough advice to fill a few swimming pools, but what it all comes down to fits in a tear: there is no right way to grieve. C called and said, “Don’t let anyone tell you how to do this. Make yourself feel better however you can. I still have [his] clothes in the closet.” It’s been eight years for her.

The first day I left my house and went into the world was terrifying. I went into the shop and told D how guilty I felt for being alive, for walking around doing “normal” things. She looked at me indignantly and said, “Who the hell do you think you were married to? You have no right to stop living.”

The first time I left my cell phone more than three feet away from me, I told E I was going to join the gym because that’s what “normal” people do. She said, “You’ve been talking about what normal people do all day. I gotta warn you—you were never that normal to begin with.” And we laughed.

The first day I realized that I hadn’t cried yet I remembered what F told me. “Back to normal?” she said, “No. That’s not going to happen. You have to create a new normal.”

Sandra Cisneros’ Rachel was right. Here’s to onions and sweaters and little girls. Here’s to how we all feel when we wish we were a hundred and two.

I think today I will walk outside and just sniff at spring for a bit.runningman

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”

-Bertrand Russell 

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March 25, 2011

Good Pantyhose Can Work as a Fan Belt in a Toyota for at Least Three Days of City Driving

by lisa st john

I always thought the “Write about your Hero” was a lame essay topic. I do not have any heroes. Should I feel weird about that? I do now and then. Batman is pretty psycho when you think about it. He is a multi-billionaire who spends his split personality time playing vigilante. Forget Superman, who is really just an alien brainwashed by the square states mentality. Spiderman is infected…yuck. And the women? Afterthoughts of a feminist culture of guilt. Wonder Woman was my favorite; big boobs and balls to boot. But would any of us REALLY want a golden lasso of truth? Methinks not.

Shakespeare had it made. Elizabethans believed in villainy for its own sake. Sort of the post-modern view of humanity in a pseudo-technological society. Richard the Third? YIKES! He makes Bernie Madoff like look positively harmless. Titus Andronicus?  Hello, Jeffrey Dahmer.

If I had to pick a hero it would be a group—not an individual; it would be what I used to be, the working poor and middle class. The single parents, the people refusing to let go of the American dream. Okay, that sounds hokey. Let’s put it in a monologue and see if it makes more sense.

I go to put my pantyhose on and hobble out to the kitchen with one leg in and the other half in because I hear screaming and Jenna is hitting Sammy in the face with her cereal spoon yelling stop stealing my socks and the dog busts through the doggie door soaking wet with half of some bleeding animal in his mouth and all the kids start screaming then the phone rings and I wonder if the shirt Jimmy needs for today’s play is ready when I answer and it’s D___ from the diner asking if I can work a double today because the new girl called in sick and while I wonder if I can get Julie to pick up the kids from the bus on time I am also thinking that it’s Thursday and tips are great on Thursday dinner shift because of the weekly specials and Sammy comes in chasing Jenna with half a raccoon-looking creature in her hands and the dog barking behind them when I hear Jimmy yell Mom I need to get dressed like Abe Lincoln and I make it to the dryer where I slip on my work shoes and pull out a damp button-down white shirt and Jimmy is complaining that it’s wet and I drag him to the bathroom where I blow dry him with one hand and put my mascara on with the other and yell to the girls to get ready for the bus and did I call Julie? I check my watch. It’s 7:30 AM.

I guess I could choose the altruistic group like Mother Theresa and Gandhi, but I don’t believe in altruism either. Ayn Rand is an idiot. People do not do things because they make other people feel good. Logically, we would never do anything that didn’t also make US feel better.

Heroes. I choose (other than real people) Nurse Jackie and House. At least they are honest (to people other than themselves).

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March 15, 2011

I’m Not Afraid of Lightning! And I Get Summers Off!

by lisa st john

I’m Not Afraid of Lightning! And I Get Summers Off!

Yeah. I tend to forget about that fallacious perk when a kid comes in with bruises all over her arm because she “ran into a door.” For the eight weeks that we are not in the classroom with kids most teachers I know are working a second job to help pay the mortgage or taking graduate classes to keep their teaching certificates. But the point of this little tirade is this: Why is the field of education so inexplicable to anyone not in it or closely tied to it? What is so hard to understand?

Perhaps because we think in metaphor and analogy, and there really is no comparison to teaching. Plug the business analogy in. Do cubicle workers go home wondering if their clients are hungry? Or contemplating suicide? Do they wonder why J_____ wears the same clothes every day? Do they loan money to their “clients” who “forgot” their lunch AGAIN? Do they take into consideration that their “client’s” parents are either in rehab or jail or both and they are busy taking care of their siblings which is why they did not hand their paperwork (homework) in on time? Oh yeah. That analogy does not work because businesspeople are not also in loco parentis. That’s right.  We are not in a business, per se. I mean, is it reasonable to ask you, as an office worker, to track the progress of each and every client (while teaching them the beauty of mathematics), to find out why they are crying (since it probably does not have to do with differential equations), to hug them when they need it (for good news or bad), to answer their questions about sexuality or love or life in general when your masters degrees are in calculus?

Let’s try another popular analogy—that of the “professional” (like a doctor or lawyer apparently). Let’s pretend that educators have multiple degrees from academic institutions of higher learning like other professionals. OH WAIT! They DO! So. How often have you gone into your doctor’s office and demanded to know why she thinks your daughter has strep throat? How many times have you gone into a lawyer’s office without an appointment demanding to be seen? Have you ever asked for a meeting with your dentist just to question their judgment or demand that they take a pay cut? Why are their certificates more important than ours? Because everyone knows how to teach? Oh, that’s right. Because it’s so easy.

We go to graduations and weddings. But we also go to hospitals and funerals. We wake up early and work late so we can create meaningful lessons, assess the students’ work, and complete all the paperwork that any bureaucracy demands. We also spend evenings calling parents and going to concerts and games and meetings, and OH WAIT! I forgot. No we don’t. We all get out at 3:00. Oops. We don’t study and research and collaborate so we do what is best for kids—OH NO! We do that so we can show off the expensive cars and boats we get from getting paid extra for all of our time outside of 7AM – 3PM. Oh wait. We don’t get paid extra for that. Or for advising clubs or staying late to listen to a student heartbroken over … whatever teenagers are heartbroken over at that particular time because it is important to them. They are important to us. That’s why we do it.

During an interview, if a rookie ever answers the question, “Why do you want to teach?” with any response other than, “Because I love kids” they are out. I have no time for anyone who was not born into this profession—who has not found teaching as their Jungian calling. Teaching is not about giving students some information that you have and they don’t. That’s boring (at best). It’s indoctrination (at worst).  It’s about learning with them and sharing the joy of new perspectives, not showing them what they could learn all by themselves with a valid library card.

Content is just that. English, biology, calculus, algebra, studio art, drama, music, history, second languages, digital editing, consumer science, freaking basket weaving—we teach human beings how to be human beings. We don’t just teach content. We teach people. Make an analogy for that.

Talk to a teacher or someone close to a teacher.

Volunteer in a public school.

Shadow a teacher for a day.

I dare you.

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