A School of Fish

Chapel Talk – January 30, 2012

First of all, I’d like to welcome our visitors this morning. 30 Grade Ten students and six of their teachers have joined us today from the High School affiliated to Beijing Normal University to further our work together as sister schools. They’ve been in the states for 20 days, visiting colleges like Yale, Columbia, MIT, and Tulane and they return to Beijing tomorrow morning. I hope many of you will be able to visit with them today and to join us for an early dinner in Calvert at 5:30 this evening.

Secondly, I’d like to share an anecdote I read as told by my favorite author – the late David Foster Wallace, but it’s not original to him, and some of you may know it from some other source. Two young trout are swimming along and meet an older trout swimming in the other direction. He nods at them as they pass each other and says, affably, “Morning, kids! How’s the water?” After the two young trout swim on for a bit, one turns to the other and asks, “What the heck is water?” Wallace describes the point of the anecdote—that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about—as “a banal platitude with life and death importance.”

We’re all on a journey of some sort but it’s usually not very clear where we’re headed and how we’re actually making progress. Often times, here in chapel and elsewhere, we discuss ‘callings’ and being driven toward one thing or another in our lives. Teaching is a calling of sorts, as is being a social worker, a priest, or any number of pursuits. In fact, whatever it is that you have as your ‘calling’, it is of equal worth to others’ callings provided you pursue your work with honesty, dignity, and with real commitment.

I suppose one could argue that pursuing a life as an international criminal may provide less value than other, more noble pursuits, but let’s leave that for another discussion and assume that each of us in this space has at least some idea about the direction our lives are headed. Some of us may already have a clear notion about our actual calling while others are only beginning to think about this idea.

Think for a minute now about what your calling might be. How many of you have some idea about your plans in life? How many have a very clear idea and have already begun your work toward those aims? How many are just wanting to know what the math homework is tonight and for me to stop asking such annoying questions?

A good question to ask yourselves in your search for yourself, is what is the water in which I swim and how does it shape me as I move through life? The young trout were surprised by their elder’s question and probably hadn’t considered the idea that the fact that they were in water was an incredibly important and critical fact of their lives – it was the context in which they lived and defined them in very specific terms. Being aware of the context is the first and most important step toward deciding to act with courage and to shape our lives with meaning.

The anecdote has another meaning as well – the fact that the elder trout took time to point out to the youngsters that they were, in fact, in water, and to inquire as to how they were dealing with that is what your teachers and parents try to do each and every day.

The courses you take and the decisions you make, both creatively and analytically, literally describe the water around you in ever increasing detail and when your eyes and minds are open, you will find that your ability to swim will dramatically improve based on your understanding of your surroundings, and thereby the path you’re on.

To conclude, I challenge you to stop taking things for granted, to ask questions that not only help you understand your world, but most importantly, questions that help you to understand others in the world. We may swim in the same waters as others in this School, so we’d better make an effort to hear how our friends, acquaintances, and those we don’t know are experiencing their lives. We’re all at different points on our journeys toward our calling and I for one appreciate the opportunity to see my progress in ways I’ve not considered.

Thank you. Be a force for good. Enjoy the rest of your day.

You Can't Say You Can't Play

This phrase was a central feature in my children's primary and lower division classrooms. It's the title of an important book by Vivian Paley and is referenced by an important thinker on diversity in education: Randy Testa, former professor of education at Dartmouth.

In a recent communication by Testa about hazing in colleges and the shifts in the aims of schooling based on quantifiable outcomes and "return on investment", it's never been more important to promote values of inclusivity and acceptance in schools like ours.

Alfie Kohn writes in his article, Only for My Kid: “This bottom line is never far from the minds of parents, who weigh every decision about what their children do in school, or even after school, against the yardstick of what it might contribute to future success. They are not raising a child so much as a living resume.”


“Before long,” he continues, “the children internalize this quest and come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready: they sign up for activities that might impress an admissions committee, ignoring (perhaps even losing sight of) what they personally find interesting in the here and now.”


I'm not sure I agree with Testa's assertion that entitlement and exclusion are directly responsible for misbehavior in fraternities and the like, but I do think we need to remember that community building and human flourishing are based on a philosophy of hopefulness and openness. 


Robert Coles' work in this arena is also very interesting and important - if you have time, pick up a copy of Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America.


Back to my own kids: they may or may not decide to join a fraternity or a sorority, but whatever they choose, I am happy to say that those early lessons about acceptance continue to be reinforced here at Casady and for that I am truly grateful.