Posts Tagged ‘Life’
The Critical Importance Of Celebrating The Indomitable Immigrant Spirit
There’s a line from Leviticus that Jews repeat each year at Passover: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Whatever your position on the current immigrant crisis, these words are a humbling…
Read MoreThe Art of Swimming in the Great Sea of Sadness
Words have failed me in recent months. As a Jew and a human, I experience the horrific bloodshed in Israel as a firehose of tragedy so overwhelming that I can’t seem to catch my breath long enough to say anything meaningful at all. Then there’s the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, tame by comparison, as if…
Read MoreThe Graduation Speech You Need to Hear: A Message of Hope and Inspiration
If I were giving this year’s commencement speech, here’s what I would say: Dear graduating class of 2023, You live in a perilous world. You know that as well as anybody. Your generation has lived through COVID, a broken political culture, the terror of gun violence, and the specter of nuclear war once again rearing its ugly…
Read MoreThis is How Gratitude in a Broken World Looks
Tragedy Strikes A few weeks ago, on Monday, November 14, I woke up to the news that three students at the University of Virginia, where I teach–Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry–had been murdered and two others wounded the night before by another UVa student who opened fire inside a charter bus…
Read MoreWhat Are We Really Teaching Our Kids?
I published this article in Inside Higher Ed in September 2020. Even though it addresses the crisis in education brought about by both COVID and the George Floyd tragedy, its message seems highly relevant to our current climate, as well: What or why to teach are more important considerations than how to teach if we are to…
Read MoreHow to Have Radical Hope in Troubled Times
Hope In The Sadness A few weeks ago it was a beautiful Monday in Northern Virginia, where I celebrated the Fourth of July with my family. I felt good about life and at peace with the world, a rarity for me these days. Late in the afternoon, a headline popped up on my phone…
Read MoreHow The People of Ukraine Are Living Out The Deepest Lessons of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
Pierre Bezukhov at the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace Ukraine And Russia Whenever I mention that I teach Russian literature these days, I get a weird look of surprise, confusion, or even disgust. I’m not alone. A few weeks ago a German university canceled a class on Dostoyevsky in order to make a…
Read MoreAs Educators, What Can We Learn from the Attack on the Capitol?
A week after protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the pictures are still hard to fathom. While peaceful demonstrations are rightfully a part of life in Washington, this incident is unlike anything we’ve seen in two centuries. The Senate chamber was breached by people wearing combat gear and carrying zip ties. A Confederate…
Read MoreStudents Don’t Need You to be a Perfect Teacher Right Now
In early March, my university administration informed me that I had a week to transition my University of Virginia course Books Behind Bars online. This is a class I’ve been teaching for the past decade, where UVA students meet regularly with incarcerated youth at Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center in Richmond, Virginia to explore questions…
Read MoreHow to Teach Your Kids When You Have No Idea What You’re Doing
As the COVID-19 threat wreaks havoc on our lives, all of us are coping with the utterly unpredictable and traumatic circumstances as best as we can. For parents, in particular, who have been thrust into the role of a full-time stay-at-home mom and/or dad and full-time teacher, this new world is especially terrifying. John Dewey,…
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