This moves me in a way I can't explain. Which explains why I started crying in class. Bawling is probably a more accurate word. I can't imagine what it would feel like to ask your blood to die--to, quite literally, send your son to his death in the name of heroism. I think a lot about love and its power--and I wonder what I would have done had I had someone in the Twin Towers or had someone in one of those airplanes.
This week, Mr. Schwartz took us through a 9/11 timeline. There was a phone message he played out loud to us--a mother leaving a message for her son, telling her son that his plane has been hijacked, and asking her son to do everything in his power to overtake the people who have hijacked the plane.
This moves me in a way I can't explain. Which explains why I started crying in class. Bawling is probably a more accurate word. I can't imagine what it would feel like to ask your blood to die--to, quite literally, send your son to his death in the name of heroism. I think a lot about love and its power--and I wonder what I would have done had I had someone in the Twin Towers or had someone in one of those airplanes.
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"What happened after that had a dreamlike quality: in a dream I saw the jury return, moving like underwater swimmers, and Judge Taylor's voice came from far away and was tiny. I saw something only a lawyer's child could be expected to see, could be expected to watch for, and it was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty...
"A jury never looks at a defendant it has convicted, and when this jury came in, not one of them looked at Tom Robinson. The foreman handed a piece of paper to Mr. Tate who handed it to the clerk who handed it to the judge... "I shut my eyes. Judge Taylor was polling the jury: 'Guilty...guilty...guilty...guilty...'" As a literature lover, this section of To Kill a Mockingbird has always moved me in quite a profound way. The imagery from the first paragraph helps numb me for the second section and then it's lifted and once I read the 'guilty' verdicts, my heart is stabbed, over and over and over again. I've actually never watched the mov "In the name of God, do your duty."
-Atticus Finch Atticus Finch is my moral hero. I've been contemplating lately what it means to grow up (as shown by my last post, too). I posted on Facebook the other day: "What are some signs that you have grown up?" I jokingly put that I knew that I was grown up the day I was doing my own shopping at Costco with my own Costco card. My friend Ray replied, "Bills." The most profound reply, in my opinion, came from Jennifer Murphy, my former Instructional Resource Teacher at my previous school. She said, "Empathy." We've been talking about empathy a lot in class. It seems to be an appropriate topic considering Atticus Finch's incredible ability to empathize. This quote, from his closing statement in the courtroom, makes me cry every time--I empathize with Atticus' plea. In my head, when I read this section, I'm begging this jury to do the same thing. I wonder sometimes if I'm just a super emotional person, which sounds like a flaw. Other times I wonder if I'm just incredibly empathetic--which sounds like a strength. "It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
~Gabriel Garcia Marquez I'm 23 years old. I've been teaching since I was 19. I started teaching playwriting through the California Playwright's Project where I got to teach at a myriad of schools and got to meet a multitude of different personalities. When Taylor Swift was 22 and singing about "eating breakfast at midnight" and "dressing up like hipsters", I was a high school teacher teaching kids who were doing the same things as Taylor Swift. I have felt very old for a very long time, even though the truth is I'm still young and I've still got things to do with my hopefully long life. I am lucky enough to be a teacher--with students around me constantly who make me feel both very old and very young at the same time. The students around me are constantly dreaming--and one of my major dreams is to help my students achieve theirs. However, where I am REALLY lucky is that my students move me to remember my own dreams on a daily basis. A few of these dreams include one day: 1. Moving to Madrid and teaching English 2. Living in Italy 3. Traveling to Budapest 4. Getting a Masters degree in Fine Arts (Theatre emphasis) 5. Getting productions of plays I have written 6. Getting a degree in Psychology 7. Writing and producing and performing my music 8. Finding love and happiness I went into education with the lofty and grandiose goal of saving creativity and imagination in school. I know that I will likely not do this alone. I know that skills are important, and that sometimes drilling facts is necessary. However, I don't ever want to forget how important it is to exercise our creative talents, to think outside of the box, to talk to our imaginary friends, to create senseless acts of beauty. I love Calvin and Hobbes because it reminds me of all of this. This particular comic touches me pretty deeply--it has commentary on medication that I don't quite agree with--sometimes (but not always) medication is something that's needed for a student to succeed. However, I think what it is saying about erasing imagination is something powerful that we should be wary of. I really hope that I never let creation/thinking outside of the box/imagination disappear from my type of teaching--and I sincerely hope my students and parents call me out on it if it ever feels like it is.
I've been very interested in the idea of good and evil, and the line between love and hate. There's a TED Talk by Philip Zimbardo (which is absolutely mind-blowing, but pretty disturbing simultaneously) that is about this concept of "The Lucifer Effect". He talks about Lucifer meaning "light" and how Lucifer was God's favorite angel. Then, he discusses Lucifer's fall from grace. Zimbardo, who was the head researcher and the superintendent of the Stanford Prison Experiment, talks about how the same exact situations can produce good OR evil in us--how the same situations produce heroes OR villains. If we are conscious of this, though, we are more empowered to walk away the lover, the hero. Another thing that moves me about his talk is the third thing that you can walk away as--guilty of the sin of passivity. These are those of us who don't do anything at all, and just let the evil go on since we neither participate in it nor fight it. That's one of my greatest fears, actually--that I will be guilty one day of participating in evil because I don't recognize it around me. This quote by Marilyn Monroe reminds me that I'm very much capable of that and have to constantly be aware.
"The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom."
~Martin Luther King Jr. I Have a Dream I think it's easy to forget that we are all connected. Sometimes, we are all so caught up in the rat race. We are all caught up in ourselves and our individuality--what am I having for lunch? What is stressing ME out? What are MY hopes and dreams? What is standing in MY way? Something that I have learned to accept and embrace as that we are all connected to one another--therefore, if there are problems in the world, especially in the case of large problems facing humanity, they are my problems. I love this section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech because he recognizes that other people are realizing this very thing--that our destinies are tied up with one another's--that we can never be completely free until we are all free. This quote from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird moves me because I know this feeling. When I was in college, there was a point in time where I wasn't getting a whole lot of reading done. An avid reader for the vast majority of my life, I realized that I wasn't reading at all when I started living with a girl who was always reading 10 different books at once. She knew so much! The conversations I had with her were (are--we still talk!) so lively and so interesting, and I was reminded of how much more fascinating a person is when they are readers. This got me back into reading, and now, I'm always reading 10 books at once as well! Thanks Janie Schumacher!
When I was younger, there was period of time when I was SUPER obsessed with dreams. I read a bunch of dream books, read a bit of Freud and what dreams might mean (that was a little disturbing...). This quote by Edgar Allan Poe really moves me because it reminds me that we don't need to be asleep in order to dream. And in fact, we SHOULD continue to dream while we are awake--it is the best time to dream since we can work on making those dreams come to life!
I have read in a couple articles and in a couple books that Steve Jobs was maybe not that nice of a guy. However, it's pretty obvious how genius he was throughout his career and throughout his life. Truth be told, a lot of his quotes move me. It is really important to me to question the world around me--to analyze what is going on and to rationalize my way through why certain rules, expectations and norms are in place. There's this short story called The Lottery by Shirley Jackson where a community kills one of its members every year, simply because it is a tradition and it has been done every year for as long as they could remember. This quote by Steve Jobs reminds me that the crazy ones, the questioners, the trouble-makers "push the human race forward." It is important to be smart about this, though, and not just to be crazy! It is important to have purpose and reason. However, this reminds me not to be afraid to step outside of the box, to not be afraid to break the mold.
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Carol CabreraWhat truths can I find in art, history, and in literature? Archives
September 2014
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