On Walking - Commencement 2012

Commencement Address – 2012

Welcome students, families, faculty and staff and the Board of Trustees.

Each of you should be proud to have arrived here today. You’ve successfully navigated the challenges given to you at this highly rigorous and prestigious institution and you’ve done so with grace and with dignity. You have been and are surrounded by so many who love and care for you, all of whom are proud of you not because they have something to gain by your successes, but because we all do. By becoming the person you are, the world has become a better place to live.

And that, in the end, is the thing that matters beyond all else. Your paths will diverge but it is my hope that each of your walks through life is imbued with the intention to broaden understanding, develop a strong commitment to citizenship, and to bring people together toward a common good. As you saunter through life, embrace each success and failure -- learn from them – they make you who you are.

In his essay, “Walking”, Henry David Thoreau discusses the etymology of the word ‘saunter’. In the middle ages, he points out, pilgrims who were preparing to embark on a journey to the Holy Land (Sainte Terre) were called “Sainte Terrers”.

To saunter, then, is not to wander aimlessly, but to walk with a sense of purpose – to be a pilgrim on a journey of discovery and enlightenment. There were many pathways toward the Holy Land and many relics to encounter along the way, but no matter how the particular journeys varied, the central unifying motivation that these “Sainte Terrers” had was to become more holy and closer to God.

It took resources to make these journeys, so in order to prepare, communities provided support, monetarily and otherwise. Look around you. Countless individuals here and elsewhere have supported you in countless ways as you’ve prepared for this day. Be sure to thank them. And while you may not fully appreciate all that you’ve been given, I assure you, upon reflection in years hence, you’ll be overwhelmed with gratitude for their assistance.

Thoreau walked a great deal, mostly avoiding well-worn roads, rarely making the same journey twice. He believed that his own particular travels broadened and deepened his understanding of the world. Instead of only following roads created for practical purposes, his meanderings served a higher calling. He wrote:

"We saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn".

Take time to focus on where you put your feet and see what actually surrounds you; be present and awake in your journey. Moving through life in an illusion of someone else’s making makes you less of yourselves and less able to make the necessary choices to live full and complete lives.

So, become disillusioned. This is necessary in living a life of purpose and in truth. When you live your lives in pursuit of what is real rather than imagined you truly grow. When you act with faith and with courage that your own choices are good for you, your family, and your friends, you will indeed make a difference.

At Casady, the walk around the lake is a πmetaphor for your growth as human beings and since you’ve now completed that walk, you must continue it, although in brand new surroundings and with acquaintances unknown.

Walk with purpose, but be sure to take the opportunities to diverge and veer when they arise – with the right mindset, those divergences will reap great rewards for you. You have much to be proud of and I wish you well each and every day of your lives.

Congratulations!

Casady Celebrates 65 Years - My Remarks

Welcome to you all. I’m so proud to be here, with each of you, as we pause and celebrate the enduring influence our School has had on our lives.

In mid-February of 1947 (65 years ago yesterday), a group of laypersons and members of the Diocese of the Episcopal Church of Oklahoma established a school and cast a vision for a Diocesan Center that would occupy a section of land on the corner of Penn and Britton. Those people set in motion a collective effort to bring the finest schooling experience possible to a rapidly growing and vibrant community in the middle of the United States – a set of decisions that has had a lasting impact and an undeniable role in the formation of our city today and in communities far beyond Oklahoma City.

There are people in this room who first stepped foot on our campus 65 years ago as students, some as parents, and some whose children have just begun their journey around the lake. We, current and former trustees, current and former faculty and staff members, alumni, parents, grandparents and perhaps a great-grandparent or two, have gathered tonight to celebrate how Casady has shaped our lives individually and collectively, both here in Oklahoma City and far beyond.

Our facilities have changed and improved over time, but echoes of those individuals who filled the classrooms, dining halls, stages, and athletic fields resonate in the very fabric of Casady School today. Their voices and ours join together to continue building the vision that began the School and that has shaped the lives of so many since its inception.

While each of our lives is uniquely our own with our own very particular trajectory, there are points in time and in space where our life paths cross and we take the opportunity to pause and reflect with one another out of respect for a common, yet extraordinary, bond.

Tonight is one of those occasions.

During the past year, we have had many opportunities to reflect and remember what has made our school what it has become. We’ve welcomed new members to the Casady family and we’ve memorialized those who have passed on, ensuring that their legacy, large or small, is a valued part of who we are and of our spirit.

Of course, there is a select group of individuals who have chosen to devote their lives with a calling to ensure each of our students has an unparalleled education and, in turn, makes our world better every single day: our faculty and staff.

For the past 65 years, it has been those rare individuals who have been the heart and soul of our School. Many former teachers have departed, of course, but here tonight, their collective voices live on and are amplified by those today who, day in and day out, work with each of our students to prepare them, with faith and with courage to live lives of substance and meaning.

Words cannot express the gratitude generations of families have had for the thousands of hours of preparation, instruction and care you all have provided for each of our students.

Would the faculty and staff please stand and be recognized.

As the chapel bells ring out the "Casady Hymn" each morning, we are connected to one another through song and reminded: 

Give us grace that we may find, in each heart and mind,
 

Patience, truth and honor forever more.

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.

Why the Pursuit of Excellence Matters

I just read an interesting article by Erik Reece from Orion Magazine on the current state of affairs in American schools. He points out, rightly, that our students are generally unprepared, bored, and uninspired because they haven't been pushed to pursue those things that really matter - citizenship, innovation, and critical thought. This is because they are taught in a system that necessitates teaching 'to the test' and a teacher education model that isn't cultivating the kinds of teachers who can work toward those habits of mind due to bureaucratic regulations and a lack of resources, both financial and intellectual, necessary to create excellent educational experience. 


I'm fortunate to lead a school which is able to do things the right way. Our teachers are inspiring, they care deeply about their subjects and their students and they have the freedom to pursue ethical dilemmas because they/we want to ensure that our graduates know how to think, have the courage to act, and have faith in their own development as human beings in the world that their work makes a difference. 


A couple of excerpts from the article:


"Deborah Meier, a senior scholar at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education and a founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, suggests that we replace the cover-the-material mode of teaching by cultivating a “habit of mind” that can be applied to all material. Such a habit nurtures the intellectual skills students need to make decisions on complex matters and is based on such things as: quality of evidence (how do we know it’s true?), consideration of various viewpoints (how would it look through someone else’s eyes?), the search for patterns and causes (what are the consequences?), and relevance (who cares?)."
...
"THE GOOD NEWS is we can begin revitalizing both education and democracy by implementing a curriculum that incubates what I will call the “citizen-self.” As teachers, I believe our purpose should be twofold: 1) to provide the opportunity for individual self-invention among students, and 2) to create a space where that individual takes on the role and the responsibility of the social citizen. The pedagogy I have in mind combines the Romantic idea of thebildung, the cultivation of one’s own intellectual and psychological nature, with the Pragmatist view that such individuality must be vigorously protected by acts of citizenship. That is to say, it encourages Deborah Meier’s “habit of mind” toward the goal of helping each student determine what she or he truly thinks and feels about an issue or an idea, and it encourages what psychologist and philosopher William James called a “habit of action,” a way of translating such thinking into citizenship. At the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that the first part cultivates the inner self, while the second shapes the outer self. But these two selves cannot be separated; each depends upon and strengthens the other."

Courage

Here's a short piece on courage and its place in education (Chapel Talk October 3, 2011):

What if I told you that I heard that there was a sale on for chicken wings at the deli counter at the neighborhood WalMart and I wanted to be the first in line, so I ran right across Britton Road without checking for traffic.

What if, instead, I ran across Britton in order to save a young child who had wandered out of the parking lot and onto the street?

What if I saw the same child, but I looked around but decided that someone else would probably take care of her, and that it wasn’t really my responsibility?

All three situations involve me making a decision about crossing Britton, but the situations are very different and my ability to understand the differences shapes my decision significantly.

We all know that courage is a thing that we’re supposed to have. Indeed, this school was founded with a call toward courage and a call toward faith. Our crest, emblazoned with the words Fideliter et Fortiter implore us all to act with faith and with courage as we live our lives. The lion sought it during his journey to Oz, Dr. Martin Luther King demonstrated it on marches and in speeches at a time when his very life was at stake, and today, possibly as we leave chapel and head back to class, each and every one of us will have an opportunity to act courageously.

So why is courage so important?

Whether you’re standing up for a classmate when she’s being mistreated, telling a friend bad news, admitting to your teacher that you didn’t study for today’s test, or telling your parents that you were the one who broke the vase, each time we demonstrate courage, we make a difference in a positive direction. That is why courage is so important.

Great acts of courage are inspirational and we can all point to examples that set the bar for each of us, but it’s in the day-to-day living of our lives that we must strive to live life courageously. It is our duty to our selves, our community here at School and ultimately to our world that we embrace this way of living and work to set an example for one another in the way Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and others have in their lives.

As members of the Casady School community, we must strive to be the kind of person who isn’t afraid to stand up and do the right thing. We must strive to be the kind of person who isn’t afraid to admit to our failings. We must strive to be the kind of person who is courageous enough to make mistakes, learn from them and to muster the courage to make even more mistakes.  

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

- Margaret Mead

Parenting in the Real World

Parenting is really tough, yet I am thankful that I have the opportunity to come face to face with my own deficiencies as I navigate the beginnings of my children's adolescence.

As an educator with many years experience as a Middle School teacher, I began this journey with the false belief that because I had years of experience and understanding well the adolescent brain, that I'd be more than ready when the time came for me to help shape and guide my kids toward healthy and successful lives. 

Boy, was I misguided. 

Despite my own knowledge and understanding of adolescence as a Theory, practicing effective parenting is another skill entirely. 

Perhaps two articles I've read in the last few days could help shine a light on both why explicitly teaching character development and brain physiology contribute to deeper and perhaps more effective parenting and teaching...

This article in National Geographic points out some reasons why I'm destined to keep the learning curve steep and to continue developing skills like grit, determination, patience, and knowing when to not die on that particular hill.

That is all, for now.