Words&Dirt

“All pain attacks me with a double-edged sword: it makes me aware as never before of the divorce between my ego and my body (and its falseness, its consoling invention) and at the same time it brings my body close to me, dresses me in it as pain.  I feel it to be more mine than pleasure or mere coenesthesis.  It is really a bond.  If I could sketch I would gladly show pain chasing the soul out of the body, but at the same time I would give the impression that it’s all untrue: mere characteristics of a complex whose unity lies in not having any.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 404

“We consistently expect teachers and schools to close achievement gaps and panic when they fail to do so.  But we do not provide families with the full range of social supports children need to thrive academically, including living-wage employment and stable and affordable child care, housing, high education, and vocational training, in addition to decent nutrition and health care.

In the absence of these ‘bridging instruments’ between policy and practice, I fear American politics will continue to reflect profound disappointment in teachers, and teacher themselves will continue to feel embattled.  But there is hope.  If we accept the limitations of our decentralized political system, we can move toward a future in which sustainable and transformative education reforms are seeded from the ground up, not imposed from the top down.  They will be built more upon the expertise of the best teachers than on our fears of the worst teachers.  This is how we will achieve an end to the teacher wars.”

––The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, pg. 273-4