How I opened my classes in September

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

I believe giving our brain the food it wants, honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all.

I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities.

I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets.  I’m not original in this, but I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

Because

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit.  I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe we are all powerful.  Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.”

I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

I believe we are all poets.

And I believe understanding a poem teaches us how to live.

I believe boredom is a symptom of fear.  If we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small.  Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small.  With our boredom, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective.  Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom.  Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe one’s mind is like a big magnet.  We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

In short: We are what we read.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting.  I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment.   And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control.  You determine the story of your life, because as you are living it, you are telling it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries.  It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory.

I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story.  When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I believe writing is a necessary skill, but even more than teaching you how to write, I’d like us to become authors—people who live inside language, who use language to create worlds, and become world enough for themselves.

I believe English class is not important just because a box on a college application says so.

I believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature and art is a privilege everyone deserves.

We humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives.

I believe life gets better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test scores becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in school rules.  I believe if you chew gum in class someday someone other than yourself will have to scrape your gum off the bottom of a chair you did not buy or make.

I believe you deserve to cultivate an attention span not broken by the temptation of texting.

I believe food tastes better in the cafeteria.

I believe in taking hats off at the front door.

I believe music is amazing.  I believe music is the keeper of memories we’d otherwise lose if they were not connected to a particular song. And I believe songwriters, even the bad ones, are the bards of our time…

So I am thankful for the innovation that has made thousands of songs portable, but I believe in unplugging ourselves from this world so that we don’t feed the beast of our boredom.

I believe, in a perfect world, grades would not exist.  But I believe they satisfy the fears of people who are afraid that if left unchecked, nothing would happen in schools.

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter.

I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?”
I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens:  Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes.  Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys are spiritual and intellectual, not just physical.  I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space.  When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

And because of those spaces, we will never be the same.

This, I believe.