What I really liked about Curious was the emphasis that Leslie places on great teaching and the important role that teachers play in the lives of their students. It makes me believe all the more in the importance of building teams of teachers who share a vision for learning and a love for students and creating environments where curiosity is nurtured. No room for anyone to be bored. A must-read for educational administrators, principals and teachers. It may be calling you to set the sails in a somewhat different direction from the one you've been sailing
Ian Leslie's book Curious was a challenging read. Challenging because it made me think hard about education in ways that I didn't really want to. At one point in the book he goes hard at Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk on Imagination. I really liked that talk and it did inspire something in me about the importance of imagination in education but Robinson does suggest that this imaginative education just sort of happens rather than be something that is carefully and thoughtfully nurtured. Leslie writes convincingly about the place of knowledge and the limits of Google and Wikepedia.
What I really liked about Curious was the emphasis that Leslie places on great teaching and the important role that teachers play in the lives of their students. It makes me believe all the more in the importance of building teams of teachers who share a vision for learning and a love for students and creating environments where curiosity is nurtured. No room for anyone to be bored. A must-read for educational administrators, principals and teachers. It may be calling you to set the sails in a somewhat different direction from the one you've been sailing
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Someone showed me this photo of a refugee camp on the border of Syria and Lebanon and it could make me give into despair if I didn't have other good reasons to be hopeful. I'm enjoying a few days with part of the family in Kingston and couldn't help but think of that image and the one of children playing on the dead-end street (terrible name) at the corner of Pine and St. Catherine. The dead end streets seem to be in the refugee camps whose dusty lanes might well echo with despair and hopelessness. Where do you look to for hope in the middle of that? This might well have been the cry of the people of Israel in Zechariah's time when the people were carried off into exile. They must have been given to despair. In the middle of exile the prophet's promise comes, “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there. Isn't that what we hope for in Syria? I've been to music festivals, arts festivals, drama festivals, even apple and cranberry festivals. This coming week I am going to the Toronto Film Festival, but this weekend I went to my first ever Rib Festival in Kingston, Ontario. This is only the second annual for Kingston but apparently this happens around southern Ontario and beyond. And just so you get this right, I mean pork ribs, barbecued and slathered with sauce. Delicious actually but I'm not sure worthy of a festival. I believe there were six big semi trailer trucks set up for preparing the food, each with big banners and tables laden with the trophies they have won for best ribs, best sauce, best beans, and best cole slaw. These trophies are obviously coveted, sitting there in a drizzle of rain. My hopes for the Toronto Film Festival are higher. Half way through the run-up to this fall’s federal election I am a little cynical about all the rhetoric, the vague promises, the posturing and the outright lies. How do you remain hopeful that things might change, that Canada could become a more fair, just and generous society? How do you vote on election day without feeling sullied by the machinery of government? I had saved this quote of Parker Palmer’s from the program “On Being” and it gives me some hope that there are things that I can do at the micro level of my own self. Palmer says. “It's an act of rebellion to show up as someone trying to be whole*” and I would add, as someone who believes that there is a hidden wholeness beneath the very evident brokenness of our world. And somebody who wants to say that somehow part of that hidden wholeness is love, part of that hidden wholeness is our fellow feeling for each other, part of that hidden wholeness is a desire to make this thing work, and to work it out together. The act of persisting in those fundamental beliefs that something better is possible. I think this is courage. And I try to call myself to it every day. And I often fail. So, rebellion can be that very small thing of swimming upstream against a tide of cynicism or against a tide of scarcity. And trying to witness to that in your life day in and day out. And it can really, really make you hurt ... He refers to this hopefulness as an inner life of rebellion and I like that idea very much; that somehow to press on toward wholeness in the face of it all is a rebel act. So that is what I am going to choose for the second half of the election campaign. I read this important book this summer and I want our children to read it so that together we can talk about ‘medicine and what matters in the end.’ Atul Gawande’s new book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is a very important book for families to read together. Gawande is an American surgeon and writer who has a firm grasp on the failures and limits of medicine when it comes to end of life care. He is honest about how poorly doctors are trained to speak about the limitations of modern technology and medicine and how to talk to patients about the fact that in the end we all die. How we die can be vastly different depending on how one approaches this inevitability. Why is it that we are so bad at these conversations? We have been dying forever. Gawande says, “It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.” Gawande tells some great stories of patients that he has encountered, he talks about the dying of his great grandfather and most profoundly and compassionately, his own father. I love the understanding that he has about our life as story and the importance of having it told in ways we want to speak it. “In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. “A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.” A great conversation for the family this coming Christmas if you all happen to get together. When the grandchildren are in bed a good long conversation over glasses of wine could be the most important thing we do this year. We have a little concrete statue of St Francis of Assisi on our patio. He stands there holding onto a small tree with one hand and in his other he grips a spade. He is the patron saint of animals and ecology and is often pictured holding a small bird. Though there are many myths and legends surrounding his life it appears that he made quite the dramatic turnaround from his early years and his life’s trajectory toward wealth and prestige as held out for him by his father, a wealthy cloth merchant of the 12th Century. He might well have been the patron saint of the poor as well for he dedicated much of his life to their service. Born in 1181 Francis lived an early life of privilege, joined the army with dreams of heroism and valour, was captured and held for ransom in a dirty prison for over a year because of his father’s known wealth. The ransom was paid and Francis released. Soon after he fell seriously ill and had visions that God was calling him to rebuild his church. To Francis this meant a renunciation of his promised future status to take up a life of poverty and service to the poor. After mass one day he was convicted by opening the bible three times and reading, “If you would be perfect, go and sell all you have and give to the poor, and follow me; Take nothing with you for the journey; and if any man will follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. He took those words at face value and lived a remarkable life of self-denial. When we read those hard words of Jesus we want to find some other way to interpret or understand them. Surely he didn’t mean all that we have and shouldn’t we be prudent and at least take some small carry-on luggage for the journey. We spend great efforts in turning over words and phrases, get caught up in hair-splitting debates and church-splitting debates in order to not get on with what Jesus was on about. I think Peter Enns gets it right when he says, “If evangelicals (and I am among them) pay attention to Jesus, they will learn a vital lesson: Our own Bible shows us that getting the Bible right isn't the center of the Christian faith. Getting Jesus right is.” I received these two clay tiles from my niece this summer as a gift and they hang beside the front door of our home. They each contain a symbol that ‘hobos’ used to mark houses, fences and buildings with as a way of communicating with each other about where they might receive lodging or food, where there was danger and sometimes just symbols to encourage each other in the wandering life. The word hobo first came into use in the 1890’s and was popularized during The Great Depression when hundreds of thousands of men crisscrossed the continent hitching rides on rail cars looking for work; employment refugees on the move toward a better life. Many people were suspicious of these men and they were often pursued by the police and authorities. The top symbol means ‘this is a hospitable place’ and the lower one, ‘there are fruit trees here.’ I was thinking about these signs in relation to our current refugee crisis with millions of people on the move and seemingly few symbols for them of places where they are welcome, as we fumble for ways of managing this complex situation. Regardless of the outcomes of the world’s current refugee challenges, we might well challenge ourselves to be the kind of homes, neighborhoods, communities and people where symbols of welcome, food, shelter, safety and hospitality abound, whether for the stranger across the world or across the street. The photo of the drowned Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach is heartbreaking. There are many photos that are game changers. Maybe this could be one of them, not unlike the photo of a badly burned Kim Phuc fleeing the bombed village in South Vietnam. But they are only agents of change if we let them be that by taking action. That photo of Alan Kurdi has no doubt been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in the last few days due in large part to the ease of digital access. That in itself is amazing. If each of the viewers would take some action today, that could be the sea change that is needed. Photos of the conflict and refugee crisis have been coming out of Syria for several years now. Were those photos not good enough to wake our slumbering hearts? Did it take the death of this fleeing family to wake us? Hundreds have already drowned. And though it might be possible for the world to embrace the more than million refugees that should not be our goal. The collective global will must be bent toward peace and justice in that country and region so that there is no need to flee. This requires another kind of communal and creative action against leaders who are careless with their own people as Assad has been. If all we do is look at the photo that becomes its own kind of pornography. The same digital tool that sent that photo around the world is one way to make a difference. Yes, Canada needs to be more generous in receiving refugees. Tell your MP that today. And Canada needs to spend more on foreign aid than it does. Let your MP know that today. There was a time when Canada was a more generous country than it is today. That can change with the kind of government that we elect. Listen to what your choices are in this regard in the upcoming election. We might well get into the practice of taking a few moments at the end our news-reading to ask ourselves what is now required of us now that we know. I noticed today when I was running some errands, and I had planned a route in my mind as to the most efficient way to get to these three different locations, that I was in a rush to get from one spot to the next. The truth is that I do this a great deal and one day soon I will pay the piper for my excessive speed. I’m living on borrowed time since I have not had a speeding ticket in more than a decade. But what am I in such a rush about? What got me thinking about this was the last leg of my morning’s errands which took me past an Esso station that had my theme in bold letters on the store front: On The Run. The really ridiculous part of all this is that I for one have absolutely no need to be in a rush. No one is waiting for me at home, I have no appointments, no schedule, no long to-do list and no one supervising my work. I don’t want to be that person who is anxiously rushing about. I have lots of time to pay attention, to slow down, to be attentive. I know someone who does this really well. Our dear friend and plumber Kevin has figured out that people are more important than leaky faucets and in fact the leaky faucet is a good way to connect with people. He understands the sacrament of ‘showing up,’ especially when things have gone sideways. I mean sacrament because he might show up with his little flask of gin and some crackers when Eucharist is required. At the very least, there is always time for a coffee. I copied this quote by Arthur Simon some months ago because I must have been thinking about this then as well. He really nails it for me. “Ours is a restless culture. Life has become excessively busy for a large portion of the population. Stress is almost built into our body clocks. I am not a fast driver, probably slower than most. But sometimes I find myself hurrying to get somewhere—switching lanes, passing traffic, going through yellow lights—when it occurs to me that the only thing putting pressure on me to rush is my own state of mind…. Our wants are constantly expanding, and our income usually lags behind. More hours to work, more things to do, and more places to go create pressure. Far from producing a sense of inner peace, this style of life nurtures a spiritual void.” As summer gives way to autumn, there are so many good things to stop and pay attention to as geese gather and fly, fruit ripens and leaves begin to change color. I need to slow down and live ‘eucharistically.’ I’ve been following Seth Godin for a number of years mostly for his brilliant ideas on marketing. He is a very successful and prolific writer who has published in some pretty unique ways and he seems endlessly curious about how things and people work. He understands the power of story, especially as it relates to selling things and ideas but in most other ways he is hard to pigeon hole. This summer he wrote this wonderful short blog about caring as opposed to calling. I think it’s brilliant. “I don't think we have a calling. I do think it's possible to have a caring. A calling implies that there's just one thing for you, just one thing you're supposed to do. What we most need in our lives, though, is something worth doing, worth it because we care. There are plenty of forces pushing us to not care. Bosses, systems, bureaucracies and the fear of mattering. None of them are worth sacrificing something as important as caring.” I’ve long held up Frederick Buechner’s words on vocation which still really resonate for me (“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”) but I do think we attach a certain mysterious spirituality to calling that suggests we will see the answer to our vocation written in the clouds or in the dregs of our tea leaves. To consider vocation in the light of caring is very helpful to me. We all have things that we care deeply about and if we let those carings guide us we might end up loving more deeply the daily work of our hands. |
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