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My Two-House, Duffel-Bag Life (Published 2021)

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When my parents divorced, I lost the link that held our family together. And then I found it.

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We've never written about this essay on our college admissions blog before. But we figured...why not? If one were to ask us what is the most famous college essay ever written, we know the answer hands down. It's this NYU applicant's essay from many, many years ago. To this day, it remains well known in the highly selective college admissions community. But, today, we'd like to discuss it. Look, it's extremely well written. Rarely - and we mean rarely - have we seen students with this kind of writing ability. Did we say rarely yet? Because we do mean rarely. And it's quite funny. The guy can make 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes.

And while it was a great essay at the time and the writer definitely has a sense of humor, we strongly discourage students from writing essays in this style. For one, every single admissions officer - from the ones who are first out of college to the veterans of the departments - will know from where you're taking inspiration. Also, this essay is kind of mocking the entire college admissions process. The writer is essentially saying that he has done all of these amazing things in life and he hasn't even yet gone to college. Sure, it's written tongue in cheek but, at the end of the day, the essay says little about the actual applicant. Because, presumably, little or none of it is true. That's the whole point.

Look, this was a great essay all of those years ago. There's a reason it's a famous essay. What we're saying is don't even think about taking inspiration from it or writing anything stylistically similar because that is not a good idea for you. Here's the essay:

"I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.

Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes.

I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. I was scouted by the Mets. I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire.

I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life, but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.

I breed prize-winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But, I have not yet gone to college."

What do you think about this college essay? Let us know your thoughts by posting a Comment below. We look forward to hearing from you! Oh, and if you're a rising high school senior, now is the time when you should be working on your college essays. So contact us today to get started!

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Famous College Essay | Ivy Coach Admissions Blog

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We've never written about this essay on our college admissions blog before. But we figured...why not? If one were to ask us what is the most famous college essay ever written, we know the answer hands down. It's this NYU applicant's essay from many, many years ago.

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Dear (School), Here's my Soul in 600 Words or Less

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Dear (School), Here's my Soul in 600 Words or Less

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My greatest obstacle? After sixteen years on a dying planet, it's definitely this essay. I've never felt smaller or more alone. The typos that Google Docs catches (or adds) will define the rest of my life. And Google thinks my name's an error, so I'm not optimistic.

I've stared at a blank page for two weeks, after countless false starts about a made-up drug addiction and a math class I found difficult. Each felt like more of a bald lie than the last. So I'll try honesty: this essay is killing me. Writing it is like typing on a keyboard made of knives.

When do the measurements of my worth end? I don't have any standardized aptitude left to test. Why repeat the dance over and over again? We both know how this works. My rank's below rich kids, and above Thomas Jefferson's descendants.

But I'm writing anyway, because [School] has been my dream ever since Mom told me it was my dream. I was skeptical at first, since Twitter talks a lot about élite overproduction. After some digging, though, I discovered that that idea's a scam to keep me poor. Much like [School]. It's a bit of a lose-lose (money), so I've decided to keep Mom happy.

I took a campus tour to imbue my begging with a personal touch. Here are some descriptive details: the beer was cheap, the weed was expensive, and the sky was beautiful. I'll remember that royal blue every time I think about my debt.

[School]'s work-study program presented a glimmer of hope for avoiding loan sharks. Then I learned that the student workers went on strike last year, and now they look broken. I'm already dead-eyed, so that wouldn't be a huge change. But I'm guessing an incoming fast-food robot is cheaper, so the entire point is probably moot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still planning on attending [School]. I'd like to understand the news and have a job adjacent to dignity. [School] holds the keys to both, and the connections to exploit them. I'll just have to moonlight in organized crime.

I can't say that this obstacle has taught me much. This is my third written defense of my humanity this year. And, between job hunting, dating, and safety-school applications, it won't be my last. I just hope that kowtowing gets easier with practice. Humans are born with a lot of pride, and it takes work to bury the last scraps of it.

As for overcoming the obstacle, I haven't. Even after I finish this essay, new prompts will haunt my siblings, neighbors, and offspring. The climate apocalypse offered humanity a rare chance to escape the admissions process. But some thoughtless engineers in Switzerland have cracked carbon capture, a half-measure allowing mankind to continue to limp along. We're stuck.

If [School] gives me a chance, I'll study economics. Then it's a small step to consulting and the board of an oil company. There I will dedicate myself to finally snuffing out the light of human civilization, and take down admissions with it. With education, everything is possible.

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Dear [School], Here's My Soul in Six Hundred Words or Less

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My greatest obstacle? After sixteen years on a dying planet, it's definitely this essay.

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High-school senior Brittany Stinson learned Thursday she was accepted into five Ivy League schools - Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell.

She also got into Stanford, which has an acceptance rate of 4.69% - a lower rate than any of the Ivy League schools.

"I'm sort of still in shock. I don't think I've processed everything yet," she excitedly told Business Insider.

The Ivy League is notoriously hard to get into, as the hundreds of thousands of other applicants to the eight elite schools are well aware.

The schools Stinson was accepted into have acceptance rates ranging from 13.96% to 4.69%.

Stinson graciously shared her Common Application admissions essay with Business Insider, which we've reprinted verbatim below.
Prompt 1: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. Managing to break free from my mother's grasp, I charged. With arms flailing and chubby legs fluttering beneath me, I was the ferocious two year old rampaging through Costco on a Saturday morning. My mother's eyes widened in horror as I jettisoned my churro; the cinnamonsugar rocket gracefully sliced its way through the air while I continued my spree. I sprinted through the aisles, looking up in awe at the massive bulk products that towered over me. Overcome with wonder, I wanted to touch and taste, to stick my head into industrialsized freezers, to explore every crevice. I was a conquistador, but rather than searching the land for El Dorado, I scoured aisles for free samples. Before inevitably being whisked away into a shopping cart, I scaled a mountain of plush toys and surveyed the expanse that lay before me: the kingdom of Costco. Notorious for its oversized portions and dollarfifty hot dog combo, Costco is the apex of consumerism. From the days spent being toted around in a shopping cart to when I was finally tall enough to reach lofty sample trays, Costco has endured a steady presence throughout my life. As a veteran Costco shopper, I navigate the aisles of foodstuffs, thrusting the majority of my weight upon a generously filled shopping cart whose enormity juxtaposes my small frame. Over time, I've developed a habit of observing fellow patrons tote their carts piled with frozen burritos, cheese puffs, tubs of ice cream, and weightloss supplements. Perusing the aisles gave me time to ponder. Who needs three pounds of sour cream? Was cultured yogurt any more wellmannered than its uncultured counterpart? Costco gave birth to my unfettered curiosity. While enjoying an obligatory hot dog, I did not find myself thinking about the 'all beef' goodness that Costco boasted. I instead considered finitudes and infinitudes, unimagined uses for tubs of sour cream, the projectile motion of said tub when launched from an eighty foot shelf or maybe when pushed from a speedy cart by a scrawny seventeen year old. I contemplated the philosophical: If there exists a thirtythree ounce jar of Nutella, do we really have free will? I experienced a harsh physics lesson while observing a shopper who had no evident familiarity of inertia's workings. With a cart filled to overflowing, she made her way towards the sloped exit, continuing to push and push while steadily losing control until the cart escaped her and went crashing into a concrete column, 52" plasma screen TV and all. Purchasing the yuletide hickory smoked ham inevitably led to a conversation between my father and me about Andrew Jackson's controversiality. There was no questioning Old Hickory's dedication; he was steadfast in his beliefs and pursuits - qualities I am compelled to admire, yet his morals were crooked. We both found the ham to be more likeable-and tender. I adopted my exploratory skills, fine tuned by Costco, towards my intellectual endeavors. Just as I sampled buffalochicken dip or chocolate truffles, I probed the realms of history, dance and biology, all in pursuit of the ideal cart-one overflowing with theoretical situations and notions both silly and serious. I sampled calculus, crosscountry running, scientific research, all of which are now household favorites. With cart in hand, I do what scares me; I absorb the warehouse that is the world. Whether it be through attempting aerial yoga, learning how to chart blackbody radiation using astronomical software, or dancing in front of hundreds of people, I am compelled to try any activity that interests me in the slightest. My intense desire to know, to explore beyond the bounds of rational thought; this is what defines me. Costco fuels my insatiability and cultivates curiosity within me at a cellular level. Encoded to immerse myself in the unknown, I find it difficult to complacently accept the "what"; I want to hunt for the "whys" and dissect the "hows". In essence, I subsist on discovery.

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This essay got a high-school senior into 5 Ivy League schools and Stanford

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High-school senior Brittany Stinson got accepted into Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Stanford.

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he thing that separates human beings from other animals is our extraordinary capacity for complex, abstract thought. This is what has given rise to our diverse cultures, our scientific achievements, our ability to envisage the future and, hopefully, make it better than what has gone before. But our imperfect minds have also generated terrible mistakes and dangerous ideologies. If we don't know how to distinguish bad thinking from good, we can end up believing what we shouldn't, and behaving in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these "intellectual virtues" even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Throughout history wise men and women have applied themselves to these problems in the service of their own development and that of humankind. Rather than start from scratch, why not draw on thousands of years of experience, and millions of hours of reflection and practice? Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think - and live - well.

1. Be sincere

"A wrangler is one who aims only at victory, being indifferent whether the arguments which he employs support his own contention or that of his opponent."
Akapāda Gautama
Written some time between the sixth and second centuries BCE, supposedly by Akapāda Gautama, the Indian classic the Nyāya Sūtras is the first great treatise on the principles of reasoning. Gautama distinguishes between three kinds of debate. In jalpa (wrangling) the aim is victory, while vitanda (cavilling) is concerned wholly with criticising the other side. But in good or honest discussion, vada, the aim is truth.

Sometimes philosophy descends into adversarial combat. But the best thinkers avoid wrangling or cavilling. One such philosopher, Bernard Williams, identified sincerity as one of the two primary "virtues of truth", alongside accuracy.

The most dangerous enemy of sincerity is not deliberate deception but the desire to be right overpowering the desire to get to the truth. Sincerity in thought therefore requires overcoming an ego that hates admitting being wrong.

2. Be charitable

It's easier to dismiss people we disagree with if we attribute to them obviously foolish or stupid beliefs. But just as we are not as smart as we like to think we are, other people are not usually as stupid as we take them to be.

The best way to understand any position is to ask what assumptions would make it rational

To avoid what David Hume called the "vulgar error" of "putting nothing but nonsense into the Mouth of the Adversary" we should employ the principle of charity. This requires us to consider the best, strongest version of an opponent's argument, not only the worst. This may be a better case than they themselves can muster. If you were a remainer during the EU referendum campaign, for example, it would have been all too easy to brush aside some of the crass claims made by the official leave side. But there were more serious, less easily dismissed arguments, and those were the ones that most demanded a response.

Applying the principle of charity can expose flaws as well as strengths. Janet Radcliffe Richards believes the best way to understand any position is to ask what assumptions would make it rational. Why would a family think a drunk relative was a suitable babysitter, but only until they discovered she was an atheist? Their conclusion is rational if you think that the risk of being led into hell is worse than the risk of being harmed through negligence. The family's reasoning was flawless: it was their premises that were wrong.

3. Be humble

Philippa Foot was one of the best British philosophers of the 20th century. Yet she told me, "I couldn't give a five-minute lecture on dozens of philosophers. I couldn't tell you about Spinoza. I'm very uneducated really."

Mary Warnock was another philosopher with a keen sense of humility, saying: "I haven't done very much work and I haven't done it very well."

Both women's remarks sound ludicrously self-deprecating to anyone who knows their work. In fact, they reveal a self-awareness and honesty that helped them to excel. Foot was probably right to say that she wasn't as good a scholar as many of her peers and wasn't especially clever in the sense of having an ability to process complex logical calculations quickly. Rather than trying to compete with those who were, she played to her strengths: great insight, a penetrating mind, and a good nose for what's right.

Similarly, Warnock's excellence was not as an original thinker. She was a great explainer of others' ideas and, most importantly, a brilliant chair of ethics commissions which helped bring experts together to make public policy. She left a greater legacy than much work by "better" philosophers.

There are times when confidence and conviction are needed. But when we're trying to think as clearly as possible, their absence is a virtue, not a vice. We should all become self-aware about where our intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie. Social media shows how the temptation to opine over and above our competence is strong, and must be resisted through intellectual humility.

4. Keep it simple, but not simplistic
"It is futile to do with more things
that which can be done with fewer."
William of Ockham
The principle of Occam's razor - one should not multiply entities beyond necessity - was sadly never expressed so clearly by the 14th-century Franciscan friar to whom it is attributed. Sometimes called the parsimony principle, it has come to refer to the idea that all other things being equal, a simpler explanation is preferable to a more complicated one.

Applying the principle, however, is no simple matter. The key proviso is "all other things being equal". All-too-human cock-ups are more common than complicated conspiracies, but some things really are conspiracies. Bombs and bullets are usually fired by adversaries, but there are also false-flag operations.

Illustration: Till Lauer/The Guardian

So Occam's razor really needs the addendum "only expect as much simplicity in an explanation as the thing being explained allows". The preference for simplicity is a virtue so long as it is accompanied by a refusal to deny real-world complexities. We should look for explanations that are neither more convoluted nor more simplistic than is necessary.

5. Watch your language

In the Analects, Kongzi (also known as Confucius) says that the first thing he would do if he were to administer the government would be to "rectify names". He explains: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."

Philosophers have always been keen to define their terms and use language accurately. In the 20th century, this perhaps went too far, with some philosophers thinking that all they could do was "conceptual analysis" - or figuring out what, precisely, a term might refer to. But even that is a vital task.

Think of how common it is for the misuse of language to assist the misuse of political power: Putin's "special military operation", or the labelling of plans to fund care of the elderly as a "dementia tax".

Getting words right sometimes requires changing them. "Gay marriage" used to be an oxymoron but most have come to agree that it is right that the meaning of "marriage" has evolved. Right now, there is a heated debate about what "woman" and "man" mean in relation to trans people. There is no way of resolving this unless both sides acknowledge that they are engaged in advocacy for their preferred usages, not simply trying to show that one set of meanings is objectively correct.

6. Be eclectic

Onora O'Neill's self-suspicion captures the value and peril of casting a wide intellectual net. As a leading bioethicist, O'Neill has had to learn from medics, biologists, public health professionals, scientific researchers, civil servants and more. None of these experts is competent to resolve thorny issues like those of gene editing or embryo research alone.

Breadth of thought always requires the sacrifice of some depth - be prepared to move out of your intellectual comfort zones

Many - maybe most - important issues cannot be resolved with just one kind of expertise. To think about how to feed a nation you need to call on the knowledge of dieticians, ethicists, farmers, ecologists, cooks and economists. Climate science isn't enough to generate a policy response to global warming, you also need to know about technology, geopolitics, economics and agriculture.

Breadth used to be a typical characteristic of philosophers. Aristotle studied nature in a lagoon on the island of Lesbos, Descartes dissected animals as well as concepts, Hume was better known in his day as a historian than as a philosopher. Narrow specialisation is a recent development.

Breadth of thought, however, always requires the sacrifice of some depth. That's why you need O'Neill's acute sense of being a trespasser. We have to be prepared to move out of our intellectual comfort zones, but we also have to be careful, in unfamiliar spaces, to retain a sense of humility.

7. Think for yourself, not by yourself

In his essay What Is Enlightenment Kant defined immaturity as "the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another", adding that: "'Have courage to make use of your own understanding' is thus the motto of enlightenment."

Has the pendulum swung too far towards striking out on your own, though? As the philosopher Alvin Goldman says: "You can get more knowledge by using social sources, that is by drawing on the experiences of others and what they have to contribute. They have maybe better ideas, maybe better education than you do on certain subjects, or they have just read more about it than you have."

As Bhikhu Parekh argues, our willingness to draw on outside knowledge should extend to thinkers beyond our own cultures. Just as it is arrogant to think that we as individuals have nothing to learn from our peers, to assume any one tradition has a monopoly on making sense of the world is pure chauvinism. Our minds work best when in dialogue with others.

8. Seek clarity not certainty

Philosophers - and I suspect all of us - tend towards one of two different objectives: clarity and certainty. I think that after more than two millennia of seeing which approach is more fruitful, it is clear, if not certain, that the clarifiers have won. One of the few certainties we have is that certainty of any interesting kind is rarely possible. If you seek greater clarity, on the other hand, new vistas open up.

Another reason to be suspicious of certainty is that it is seductive. For example, psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus tell us that in court cases witnesses who express certainty about what they have seen tend to be believed more, but confidence is an unreliable indicator of accuracy. Certainty is also the friend of dogmatism, arrogance and fundamentalism. Those who seek it should be careful what they wish for.

9. Pay attention

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and a novelist. These two vocations were intimately linked. As her colleague Mary Midgley put it: "On Murdoch's view of ethics, we learn what is the right thing to do by attending to what is the case and increasing our understanding of reality." For example, empathy teaches us more about what is needed to treat a person well than moral theory.

Paying close attention, rather than constructing arguments, lies at the heart of the best philosophising

Paying close attention, rather than constructing arguments, lies at the heart of the best philosophising. Descartes is famous for his line "I think, therefore I am" but this is an argument in appearance only. It is a truth arrived at by observation: when you try to doubt that you are thinking, your doubting shows that you must be existing.

It was also by paying close attention that Hume saw how Descartes was wrong to conclude that this thinker whose existence was certain was an indivisible, mental substance. Hume, like the Buddha, invited us to attend more carefully and observe that we are only ever aware of particular thoughts, feelings and sensations, not an "I" that stands behind them.

Arguments do matter, but assessing the validity of our reasoning requires paying close attention to its progression more than it does knowledge of formal logic. Good thinking is just thinking with full attention.

10. Follow the mean

One principle that can be applied almost universally is Aristotle's incredibly useful doctrine of the mean, a version of which is also taught by Kongzi. This says that for practically every virtue, there is not an opposite vice but an excess and a deficiency. Generosity is the mean between profligacy and tightfistedness, understanding between lack of sympathy and indulgence, pride between self-hatred and arrogance.

The same applies to the virtues of thinking. Aristotle said: "It is the mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits." You can be too precise as well as too vague, you can be too understanding of a view you disagree with as well as too dismissive, you can think too much for yourself or too little.

That is why every intellectual virtue needs to come with a warning not to slavishly apply it: follow the argument wherever it leads but don't follow it to absurdity; question everything but not all the time; define your terms as clearly as you can but don't think all terms can be defined with scientific precision. Even virtuous habits of thought can become vices if they are misapplied. The virtues of thinking require balance and judgment - and, thankfully, these are skills any one of us can learn.

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Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by

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From Aristotle to Iris Murdoch: what the greatest minds of the past 2,500 years have to tell us about the good life

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The summer box office is known for action-packed hits, beloved remakes and long-awaited sequels. This year is no exception with Spider-Man: Far from Home, the Lion King and Toy Story 4 hitting the big screen. Of course summer movies have high entertainment value, but some can also offer valuable opportunities for out-of-school learning.

Students benefit from experiences that expand their knowledge, not just from math or science but also from the world around them. We all have a framework of attitudes and beliefs that define our worldview. Sometimes to see life for what it truly is, we need to break away from these notions. Movies can remind kids that we all have different perspectives, that human rights matter, that cultures can share many fundamental values, and that kindness and compassion are key qualities in a just, civil and inclusive society.

We've put together several movie recommendations to get kids thinking and reflecting this summer. The selections here can help students see the world from new perspectives, giving them an introduction to people, cultures, events and beliefs that may be new to them. And though movies aren't always 100% historically or scientifically accurate, they can still be a great starting point for rich conversations.

With references to the 1950s, there's a lot to unpack about technology vs. nature in The Iron Giant. But what kids (and even adults) will really learn from this tale of robot/kid friendship is acceptance, the consequences of being too quick to judge and the many forms of heroism.

Discussion questions: What do you know about the Cold War of the 1950s? How might the characters have acted differently if the story had been set in another time period (like post-9/11)? Where do you see statements about technology v. nature? How does paranoia drive the plot of the film?

This Disney flick about human excess and environmental decay manages to be relatable to kids. An adorable robot and his quest to connect with another are the backdrop for a reflection on the impact of our collective actions.

Discussion questions: What does Wall-E learn from the movie Hello, Dolly? How is satire used in the movie to drive home the messages about the environment and big business? What similarities do you see in the movie and in our consumption of media today? Do you think this is our future?

Coco explores the Day of the Dead and a kid's desire to become a musician despite his family's wishes. A moving tribute to Mexican traditions and customs, this movie will get kids contemplating the ways we remember and honor our departed family members.

Discussion questions: What about learning the traditions of the Day of the Dead surprised you? How does your family pay tribute to relatives and loved ones after they've passed away? How do you think the practice of honoring the dead might factor into how tight-knit Mexican families make important decisions?

Based on the real-life 1940s All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, this classic film will get kids thinking about the value of female athletes throughout history. Students will also see how both individual strength and teamwork play a factor in success.

Discussion questions: What is women's role in most professional sports ― and their role in the film? Have all those changes been good? To keep the game popular with fans, the players flaunted their femininity. Do you think this was all in good fun, a sign of the times, or somewhat demeaning?

Remember the Titans tells the inspirational true story about the struggles and victories of a newly integrated high school football team in 1971. Themes of segregation and prejudice will help students think critically about race relations.

Discussion questions: How did playing football help the students better understand the prejudice of the time? Do you see segregation or racism today in schools or neighborhoods? How might you apply the lessons from the movie (change is inevitable, teamwork and attitude are important) to the issues of today?

The main character in this satirical movie is an insurance salesman who discovers that everyone around him is part of an elaborate "show" and that every aspect of his life has been orchestrated. Kids will inevitably begin to question the consequences of our media-driven world.

Discussion questions: How does this movie address the reality of those who spend hour after hour of their free time watching TV or movies? Does the proliferation of social media make the story outdated today? What lessons can we still learn about how we consume ― and are influenced by ― media?

With a strong female lead, this sci-fi alien tale leaves out the action scenes in favor of a reflective look at how we communicate as a species. It's great for class discussions, and students will end up having lots to say about the political and personal choices we make.

Discussion questions: How might you have started to communicate with the aliens? What are the benefits of communicating through symbols rather than words? How does this movie compare with other movies or stories about aliens?

Despite some controversy surrounding a central white character in a civil rights-era film, this movie adaptation still demonstrates how oppressed people have a story that needs to be told. It will get kids thinking about segregation and class differences in our society, and what it takes to break the legacy of racism.

Discussion questions: Why do you think people might be critical that the story is anchored in the coming-of-age tale of a white girl? Do you think the characters are realistic representations of the time, or are they stereotypes? How do we know?

A girl living in England struggles to pursue her soccer dreams while also respecting her parent's traditional Indian values. This feel-good story grounds the popular "follow your heart" theme in relevant discussions about second-generation immigrant families and cultural identity.

Discussion questions: How much should you preserve the traditions of a culture when you're no longer living (or never lived) in that place? What are some strategies for helping to build up your own sense of self-worth and for coping with pressures from family members or society?

While this lighthearted tale isn't based on a historical event and doesn't delve into deep intellectual themes, it does give insight into the emotional turmoil of a young man trying to come out. It's a rare slice of cinema that gives kids a chance to relate to and empathize with the struggles of a gay man and the gay community.

Discussion questions: How does the film compare to the novel it's based on ( Simon v. the Homo Sapiens Agenda)? How do you think these childhood experiences might later affect someone as an adult? What other type of secrets do you think students may be struggling with in high school? How might it affect their relationships with their classmates?

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Here Are 10 Movies That Will Teach Kids Empathy, Inclusion And Other Good Lessons This Summer

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The summer box office is known for action-packed hits, beloved remakes and long-awaited sequels. This year is no exception with Spider-Man: Far from Home, the Lion King and Toy Story 4 hitting the big screen. Of course summer movies have high entertainment value, but some can also offer valuable opportunities for out-of-school learning.

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10 Things summer blockbusters teach us about life

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10 Things summer blockbusters teach us about life

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Editor's Note: Anna Akbari, Ph.D., is a sociologist and serial entrepreneur. She has taught at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and her research areas include technology/human relationships and happiness. She is the founder of Closet Catharsis, an image consulting company, and Sociology of Style. Follow her on Twitter.

Story highlights

I am an underdog in life. From the moment I entered the world, I was handed a collection of circumstances that most first world people would label as "disadvantages."

I grew up in a poor, single parent family. My dark features and Middle Eastern last name further complicated my Midwestern upbringing. I didn't look like anyone else (including my mother). Racism, economic hardship, and familial struggles were my everyday reality from the beginning.

But I am not the only underdog out there. Maybe you or someone close to you also has underdog status. Our individual stories are likely different, but the biographical details matter far less than the significant and perhaps surprisingly positive traits those obstacles have the power to nurture.

Ask someone who they are and how they got there, and many will begin by describing the hurdles they've encountered - the repeated rejection, the failed pursuits, the periods of scrimping.

So much of how we understand ourselves is shaped by our losses and hardships, even more so than our victories.

But as uncomfortable as they are, these personal roadblocks make us stronger and better than our more privileged selves.

In Malcolm Gladwell's new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, he argues that being the underdog and experiencing disadvantages breeds "desirable difficulties."

But how much of what's "desirable" is about perspective? Challenges don't improve us merely because they exist. We have to reflect on them and proactively adapt their lessons into our life and work habits.

The immense potential of these desirable difficulties is especially salient in the workplace.

If you've never had a safety net, then you never feel like you have much to lose.

Anna Akbari

Read more: How 5 of world's leading executives streamline their productivity

Here's why underdogs win in the workplace:

1. We're less likely to take things (and people) for granted.

Once you've felt the pangs of struggle, you don't easily forget it, particularly if it's experienced early in life. At work, this means underdogs are more likely to notice the little things and demonstrate appreciation.

Gratitude makes people happier, and since happiness is contagious, it also positively affects your coworkers. That doesn't mean we're all 24/7 bundles of cheer, but when you grow up without and have a desire for something better, you develop an inherent optimism and immunity to complacency.

2. We have rich imaginations.

Learning to do without demands creativity. Underdogs are well-versed in the art of improvisation; it's necessary for our survival.

We're scrappy. Last minute changes to a presentation? An accelerated deadline? If all other qualifications are relatively equal, I'll choose the underdog to work on my team every time.

Underdogs spend their lives imagining "more," which is invaluable in business. Everyday improvisation leads to large-scale innovation, which transforms how we work and what we collectively produce.

Read more: Deadly sins needn't always be fatal for your career

3. We are hyper-actively observant.

When you're an outsider, you vigilantly pay attention to what it takes to "fit in." Details and differences are not lost on underdogs. We quickly size up a situation and analyze how to optimize it.

Obliviousness is difficult to correct, and underdogs are aware by necessity - a sort of "mindful compensation."

Being an underdog doesn't mean you're a fraud when you do manage to find your way into more fortunate circles, but it does mean you had to become intimately familiar with the nuances of the rules to get there. This makes underdogs competitive players to watch (and hire).

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's hustle

Anna Akbari

4. We are not risk averse.

If you've never had a safety net, then you feel like you don't have much to lose.

That doesn't mean underdogs are inherently reckless, but it does bode well for taking calculated risks.

Being an entrepreneur, for instance, means you are likely to "fail" at some point - but it also means you could score big eventually. And it's not about luck (though many will flippantly dismiss it as such), but rather perseverance, resilience, tenacity, and general strength of character that leads us to succeed.

Underdogs don't take no for an answer and, perhaps counter-intuitively, tend to be very confident (while arguably less arrogant) - because without that unbridled confidence, we would still be stuck in our previous reality.

It takes a pretty serious belief in yourself to rise above those circumstances.

Read more: What football managers can teach you about leadership

5. We are very hungry.

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's hustle. With underdogs, the default answer is "yes." Yes, I can learn how to do that. Yes, I can make that happen. Yes, that is possible.

Will this can-do attitude backfire? Possibly, sometimes. But more often than not, that inner drive and hunger to excel means we're willing to acquire new skills, push ourselves out of our comfort zone (what comfort zone?), and work toward goals with laser-sharp focus.

Being an underdog in life has shaped my character and my career, making me more successful and, ultimately, happier.

But while being an underdog can make you pretty bad-ass in the workplace, let us not glamorize hardship.

Being an underdog in life has shaped my character and my career, making me more successful

Anna Akbari

Because make no mistake: It's difficult. Most of us wouldn't want to repeat the past, and we diligently strive for a better future with fewer difficulties for our offspring.

And yet, I for one would not change the personal challenges I've been dealt.

Underdog status is what you make of it. It's not a label I'm looking to overcome. It's a permanent state of being for me.

It reminds me everyday what it took to get where I am, how much I have to be grateful for, and how much room I still have to grow.

Being an underdog isn't a plea for sympathy. It's an invitation to triumph.

Read more: Women value ethics more than men

Read more: Are we ready for GenY leaders?

Read more: Five ways to quit in style

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Five reasons underdogs win in the workplace | CNN Business

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Editor's Note: Anna Akbari, Ph.D., is a sociologist and serial entrepreneur. She has taught at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and her research areas include technology/human relationships and happiness. She is the founder of Closet Catharsis, an image consulting company, and Sociology of Style.

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You | Jason Reynolds

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You | Jason Reynolds

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Dear Reader,

If you are a young person - by young person I mean 19 and younger, though young-at-hearters aren't excluded. Nor are older people. Or old people. But I'm speaking primarily to young people. Anyway, if you are a young person, the following are 10 things I've been meaning to say to you:

1. I don't believe social media is going to lead to the apocalypse. I know many people my age do, even though many of us are as caught up in its webbing as you. As a matter of fact, my generation is the generation that created it, and pushed it on you, almost force-feeding you avatars and touchscreens since you were born, only to criticize you for engaging with them, not as accessories, but as appendages. And the way we criticize is by saying (ad nauseam) that social media, and your obsession with it, will lead to the apocalypse. Well, I've never believed that. And quite frankly, I have other ideas about what will lead to the apocalypse, and it turns out it has more to do with people two or three times your age. What I do think, though, is that social media might, if we're not careful, turn an entire generation into a selfie. A generation that only looks at itself, contrived, posed to present a false perfection, won't be able to avoid or learn from the mistakes of the generations that have come before it. So... sometimes, let me take a photo with you. Just sometimes. You can put a filter on it and everything. And if not, that's okay. Then just let me take it. Let me snap the picture. Let me be involved in framing you. Let me help capture you in your best light. Maybe even tag me in the post. But please, please, please don't force me to photobomb you, because I'll do it and all you'll do is hit delete.

2. There's no way you can want to do away with injustice unless you want to do away with all of it. Remember that. You can't be anti-racist, but tease people about their weight. You can't fight for women's rights, and talk about your classmates who learn differently. I know, I know, you can't fight every fight. Except... you can. Accept... you can.

3. There's a difference between being irreverent and irresponsible. Remember this forever.

4. There are no such things as safe spaces. I'm sorry. I wish there were. I really, really do. But the world won't always be kind. As a matter fact, a lot of you already know this. So, if you are fortunate to be in a space - school, team, etc. - that has created an emotional safeness for you, use it, not just as place to relax and be yourself, but also as a place to develop relationships and fortified friendships that can recreate that warmth and comfort when school and/or the season are over. When the wolves of the world are growling. I use my mother for this. She reminds me that I'm built for this. She reminds me that I'm a wolf trap.

5. Speaking of mothers, text yours. A simple "I love you" goes a long way. She's trying. She's always trying.

6. Continue to push back. Bang your fists. Scream until your throats are stripped. Cry out. Walk out. March. Fight, fight, fight what you don't agree with, even if adults don't agree with you. Even if adults call you crybabies. Because that kind of emotion, that kind of fearlessness and gumption, that kind of empathetic desire is a seed that will grow you into adults who actually care about the world. This is true "social media."

7. Sing your song, do your dance, talk your talk. I sure did. We sure did.

8. Remember courage is often less about what you do, and more about what you don't. I know, that's a little corny, but many of you know how difficult this is. When I was younger the conversation around peer pressure was such a snoozer. Like... come on. It was always, "If so-and-so jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump?" And of course I would always say, "Of course not! That don't even make no sense." But then... when I got to that bridge, and I saw so-and-so jump, I started to ask myself, "Well... did he live?" And, "Is there water down there? Because if so, why not jump?" Yeah... don't jump. Trust me. It ain't worth it.

9. But when it comes to your dreams, JUMP. Always jump!

10. I like you. A lot. I know, that's kind of a soft landing, but this thing was supposed to be 10 things I've been meaning to tell you, and I always tell you I love you, but I rarely tell you how much I like you. So... I like you. You're wild sometimes, and a little all over the place, but, hey, so am I. But that's easy for me to say, because, well, I'm not your teacher. So... let's start this one over.

10. Be gentle with your teachers. Especially the ones you know are in it for you. And I know you know who those teachers are, because one of the things I like most about you is your ability to discern which adults actually care. So, I'm talking about those teachers. The ones who acknowledge your presence and reward your trying. Remember, they too are trying. They really, really are. Sometimes more than you know.

Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, National Book Award Honoree, a Kirkus Award winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. The American Booksellers Association's 2017 spokesperson for Indies First, his many books include When I Was the Greatest, Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (, , , and ), and Long Way Down, which received both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You by Jason Reynolds

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Dear Reader, If you are a young person - by young person I mean 19 and younger, though young-at-hearters aren't excluded. Nor are older people. Or old people. But I'm speaking primarily to young people. Anyway, if you are a young person, the following are 10 things I've been meaning to say to you: 1.

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12 Things I Learned from Life and Writing

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12 Things I Learned from Life and Writing

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My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever." And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?"

I think this pretty much says it for me and for most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday,and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things.

For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him.

Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an age. I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield.

It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.

Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive.It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don't think it's an ideal system.

Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes -- including you.

Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way,unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world.They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey. You have to release them.It's disrespectful not to. And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer, anyway.

Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.

This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.

Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober. What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power. One acronym for God is the "gift of desperation," G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

So God might mean, in this case, "me running out of any more good ideas."

While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It's where world peace begins.

Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food.

Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible.

Number six --

writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little.When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads -- for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads -- and he said to my brother, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese."

So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better.

You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs -- your truth, your version of things -- in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us,and that's also why you were born.

Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best sellers. And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can't. It won't. But writing can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will.

Number eight: families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. Again, see number one.

At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal --remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.

When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But I promise you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it,and you will be amazed.

Nine: food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.

Number 10 --grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go figure.

The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. And grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember -- grace always bats last.

Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." A good name for God is: "Not me." Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lidsbecause they don't look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.

And finally: death. Number 12. Wow and yikes. It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in." And that's how we feel our people again fully alive.

Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news. But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk.

Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, "Take off your shoes."Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary. It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know. When you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. And don't worry -- get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need. You won't be alone. They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home."

I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

Thank you.

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12 Truths I Learned From Life And Writing, By Anne Lamott | DailyGood

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My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever." And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?"

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Andy Samberg Makes Each Day Count With Thundercat and ‘Not Too Much’ Bourbon (Published 2020)

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The star of “Palm Springs,” on Hulu and at drive-in theaters, also puts A Tribe Called Quest and “Queer Eye” on his list of essentials.

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30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30 by Taylor Swift

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30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30 by Taylor Swift

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Taylor Swift reflects on all the things she’s learned leading up to her 30th birthday.

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A South Dakota school district planned to destroy Dave Eggers's novel. He went to investigate.

In early May I discovered that my book " The Circle" had been pulled from high school reading lists in Rapid City, S.D. It was one of five books - four novels and a memoir - that were deemed inappropriate for high school seniors. Copies of these books had been bought in the spring of 2021, meant to be read by seniors in the fall of 2021. But upon discovering brief sexual passages in each book, school officials pulled the titles from classrooms and even the schools' libraries. Officials eventually decided that these books, most of which had never been unpacked from their boxes and were in mint condition, should be destroyed.

This was my first time having a book I'd written banned, but two of the books, Stephen Chbosky's " The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and Alison Bechdel's " Fun Home," are routinely assigned to high school students in the United States and are routinely challenged. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a coming-of-age novel that has sold millions of copies, features a few scenes of awkward teenage sexual exploration. "Fun Home," an illustrated memoir about Bechdel's complicated childhood and her coming out as gay, includes a few cartoon panels of two young women engaged in sex. Both books had been offered to Rapid City high school students in English classes for many years before 2021, without controversy.

But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to 25 teachers spread across the district's three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended, on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the "mass exodus" of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is "disintegrating" and "imploding." Jill Haugo, a nine-year teacher at Central High School, said she has never seen anything like this. "Teachers are breaking their contracts in the middle of the year and just leaving."

How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools. One such person is the president of the Rapid City school board, Kate Thomas.

Thomas is a longtime resident of Rapid City, married with seven children, many of them grown. She was first elected to the school board in 2015. At that time, her children were home-schooled. One of them, a teenager, occasionally attended programs at Central High School. Thomas herself had attended a Rapid City public elementary school, but she enrolled in Catholic school for middle and high school. Her biography on the Rapid City school district website lists her as "a parishioner of Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help." She currently has no children who attend any schools in the district.

Shortly after Thomas was first elected to the school board, Kathryn Kettering, an English teacher at Central High School, received an email from Thomas. "She told me that she'd received a complaint from a parent who said I was teaching a pornographic book," Kettering said. The book in question was John Green's " Looking for Alaska," which includes a brief scene describing characters' fumbling attempts at oral sex.

"In all my years teaching," Kettering said, "I've never had an objection to any material I've assigned. In fact, parents often told me in conferences how much 'Looking for Alaska' meant to their kids." Thomas did not name the parent who had complained, and Kettering never heard directly from any parent about the book. Principal Mike Talley told Kettering that he would deal with the email from Thomas, and Kettering never heard anything else about the issue.

When the coronavirus hit, the mask debate engulfed Rapid City as it had every other region in the country. But in Rapid City, it dovetailed with a June 2021 election, in which four school board seats were to be filled. Residents were accustomed to genial and uneventful school board races, where little money was spent, awareness was modest, and voter turnout was low. But this election was very different in tenor and scale.

To no small extent, that difference came from two chief influences, the Family Heritage Alliance and the Free Republic Political Action Committee. The Family Heritage Alliance is a South Dakota-based nonprofit whose website explains its mission this way: "It is our wish that our culture and our government bring glory to Christ." The group has sponsored events throughout South Dakota that the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as anti-Islam, and it has promoted articles, videos and speakers that criticize homosexuality. ("We fight for families and we don't apologize for it," Norman Woods, executive director of the Family Heritage Alliance, told The Washington Post in response to a request for comment.)

The Family Heritage Alliance is also active in training, supporting and recruiting candidates for a variety of public offices. One of themwas Deb Baker, who had previously been the FHA's treasurer and a board member. Just before the election, she was removed from the group's corporate filings. Though her children and some of her grandchildren attended Rapid City schools, Baker currently has no children in any local schools. Her official bio says, "She believes all children deserve the same great education and life preparation that her children and she received from this district."

Baker's opponent in the election was Natalie Slack, owner of a small marketing firm. When Slack ran, her kids were 13, 15 and 17, and all attended Rapid City public schools. She is a registered Democrat but had voted for Republicans many times, and never thought of Rapid City as a place split down hard partisan lines. She said the pandemic and the debate over masks and vaccines changed that, as did Donald Trump's visit to nearby Mount Rushmore in 2020. "His visit polarized and radicalized people here" and stoked fears of teachers pushing a "woke" agenda, she said. A pro-Baker campaign mailer sent around Rapid City by the conservative Shining Light PAC urged voters: "Protect our students! Educate them, not indoctrinate them! "

The other major influence in the school board election was the Free Republic Political Action Committee, headed by Rapid City resident Kevin Maher. Maher is the president of the Rapid City Catholic School System, which oversees the three local Catholic schools. Though he has no children in the Rapid City public school system, his PAC poured $16,950 into the school board election, spreading its donations among four candidates: Baker, Thomas, Gabe Doney and Breanna Funke. Though $16,950 does not seem like a great sum, it dwarfed other donations in the races. (Maher did not respond to a request for comment sent to his PAC's email address.)

In the end, voter turnout was low - less than 13 percent of the electorate cast ballots - and all four candidates supported by the Family Heritage Alliance and the Free Republic PAC won school board seats. Shortly thereafter, Thomas was named president of the board. After she took office in August 2021, the board instituted a policy whereby each of its meetings would begin with a Christian prayer led by a local minister.

"Kate Thomas was terse with members of the public in meetings," said Timmi Bubac, an English teacher at Stevens High School. "The board members elected were known to not be supportive of teachers, both from actions and comments made in the past."

Standing between the board and the teachers were the principals of the three local high schools and the district superintendent. Most of the teachers I spoke to said the superintendent, Lori Simon, and the principals had been generally supportive of teachers in the past. But after the new board was installed, the superintendent and principals pursued a course of preemptive censorship.

"There seemed to be more fear driving decision-making on the part of the administration," said Bubac. "We, as teachers, began to be asked to choose materials that weren't controversial. In a meeting with administration, my colleague and I were told that we shouldn't teach a certain book because it contained abortion themes. It was clear that this request was due to the environment of scrutiny that both the board and some members of the community were creating."

The stage was set for the banning of books.

In the spring of 2021, English teachers at Rapid City's three public high schools had been asked to put together a reading list for their senior English students. The teachers chose 43 contemporary books, each fitting one of four themes - ethics in society; identity: race, gender and class; humans and the environment; and contemporary poetry - that seniors would concentrate on. For each theme, the students could choose one of six books. The teachers felt this gave students options, affording them control over their reading.

After the English teachers submitted their list, a separate committee reviewed and approved the curriculum of which the books would be a part. The books arrived in Rapid City in May 2021, at a cost of just under $70,000. They included 180 copies of " How Beautiful We Were," a novel by Imbolo Mbue; 30 copies of " Girl, Woman, Other," a novel by Bernardine Evaristo; 35 copies of " Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel; 75 copies of " The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a novel by Stephen Chbosky; and 30 copies of my novel, " The Circle."

But on Aug. 2, 2021, the high school principals and other officials from the district began to question the use of these books. Valerie Seales, the district's director of teaching, learning and innovation, sent an email to Simon with a photo of a passage from "How Beautiful We Were," indicating that she had gotten a complaint from a teacher about it. The passage describes a character encountering her parents engaged in sexual activity in the kitchen, a scene similar to the one that was seemingly objectionable in my own novel.

"I ordered that these books be returned to the warehouse," wrote Seales, who declined to comment on specific details in this story. "The reason I am bringing this to your attention is I think some English teachers are going to want to fight this fight to keep the books. I am taking the stance that they are inappropriate and we will not use them for assigned or voluntary reading list[s]. Let me know if you disagree."

In an email to the principals the same day, Simon wrote: "Now more than ever, what curriculum and resources/books we use will be subject to public scrutiny. Let's avoid issues proactively."

The district then ordered a second review of all the books on the reading list. For the next six weeks, as new passages deemed inappropriate were identified, new instructions were sent by the three high school principals - Jocelyn Hafner of Stevens High School, Jennifer Roberts at Rapid City High and Mike Talley at Central High. An email from Talley on Aug. 19, 2021, read:

"We have been asked to remove this book ['Girl, Woman, Other'] from [our] list of Literature options due to the explicit subject matter in the book. An excerpt is provided below. This book, along with the previously discussed book 'How Beautiful We Were ' need to be boxed up and transferred to the Warehouse. Please box these books up, write the total number of books in each box on the outside of the box, and have them brought to the office. 'Mandy' will complete the transfer paperwork for the Warehouse.

"You can get boxes from the custodians. Thank you."

In an unusual move, custodial staff was tasked with removing the books from classrooms - sometimes in the middle of class. But there were still copies of these books in most of the high school libraries. At one point, upon learning that "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" had not been removed from the Central High library, Talley appeared there - "mad as hell," in the words of one employee - and pulled the copies from the shelves himself.

All along, teachers tried to make adjustments without much direction from district leaders. "I asked for a meeting with administration about these decisions," said Timmi Bubac. "I was trying to understand the point of view from which they were making decisions. I scheduled a meeting with Valerie Seales, but she didn't show up." She emailed Thomas, the school board president, and got no reply.

"It just demonstrated a complete lack of respect for what we do and all the work that was done to choose relevant literature for these older students," Jill Haugo of Central High School said. "On top of everything else for the year, it just felt like the last straw."

The principals and school board did not back down. In fact, at a May 3, 2022, school board meeting, plans were presented to destroy the 350 copies of the five books in question.

Every school district discusses and lists property that is no longer useful. Surplus items may include broken gym equipment, outdated projectors or damaged file cabinets. At the May 3 board meeting, the district's list of surplus property was published. Notable was that most of the equipment was designated "to be recycled." Desktop covid dividers were "to be recycled." A refrigerator was "to be recycled." But the five books deemed inappropriate were "to be destroyed."

When the local press, in particular the Rapid City Journal, reported on this language, and when the news became national, the school board doubled down. In an email to the press signed by the entire board, the books in question were declared "pornographic." It read, in part:

"According to district policy, if a student had the explicit pictures from one of the books on their computers it would be considered pornography and they would be subject to disciplinary action. It is concerning that staff would recommend this material for a reading class. One or more of these books likely violated Codified Law 22-24-27 and would be deemed 'Harmful to Minors.' "

South Dakota's Codified Law 22-24-27 prevents the distribution to minors of sexually explicit material that is "without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Given that all five books are literary works that have only a few pages (or just a few paragraphs) of sexual content, the law does not apply in this case. Court rulings, including Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), have further found that books cannot be removed from school libraries simply because certain individuals think they're offensive.

Unspoken in much of the debate is that the vast majority of books assigned to high-schoolers also contain material that would probably be deemed objectionable under the same standards. The students of Rapid City are still allowed to read " Oedipus Rex," in which the protagonist kills his father and then sleeps with his mother. They are still allowed to read " The Great Gatsby," which contains alcoholism, adultery and murder. " Romeo and Juliet," which remains on reading lists and on the shelves of all three Rapid City public high school libraries, centers on a torrid love affair between teenagers, both of whom kill themselves.

Speaking of underage sex: There is an interesting wrinkle to the banning of sexually explicit books in South Dakota, given that the age of consent in that state is 16. In South Dakota, a 16- or 17-year-old can also be married, if they have signed permission from one parent. That means that in Rapid City, young people aged 16, 17 and 18 can legally have sex, and can legally be married (an arrangement that often includes sex), but they're not supposed to read about sex in books.

When the book ban made national news, I talked with Amanda Uhle, my colleague at the publishing company McSweeney's, about making the banned books available to Rapid City high school seniors.We called Mitzi's Books, an independent bookseller in Rapid City, and we made an arrangement whereby we would buy books for any seniors who had been deprived access to them. So far more than 400 copies of the five banned books have been provided free to these students.

With the help of Mitzi's, on May 16, Uhle and I had a public event in support of the banned books and the teachers' right to teach them. Almost 200 people attended. A number of students and parents and teachers spoke from the podium, but just as notable were those who didn't. The day of the event, three teachers and librarians who had told Uhle and me that they would speak removed themselves from the roster. They were apologetic and embarrassed, but said they could not risk public exposure.

About two dozen high school students attended the event, and they were angry. "It's just simply disrespectful," said Colton Porter, a senior. "I voted three weeks ago, and they're telling us what we can read?"

"Art in general is supposed to make you feel something," said Kiran Kelly, another senior. "You're supposed to question morals and views and other people's points of views. And if you're banning books, then you're basically saying you don't support listening to other people. You don't support seeing other people's points of view. And I think that's stupid."

Every student I met in Rapid City had a smartphone, a device known to be used to access the internet. In the age of ubiquitous online pornography, book bans are antiquated and odd, in that the instigators of such bans purport to shield young people from inappropriate material, while doing nothing to restrict students' access to the web. But it's unlikely that the Rapid City school board is genuinely trying to restrict what high school students see. More important is the symbolism. More important is bullying the district's teachers away from assigning challenging books.

"I actually apologized to my students at the end of this school year, admitting to them that I didn't think they got the best of me," said Bubac. "I was teaching scared. I only selected safe books this year. I did as I was told by leadership. I feel sad that I did this, but until this year, I hadn't any complaints about any books that I taught."

When I met Jen Mueller, who teaches AP English, she was in her last few days at Central High School. She had spent 22 years at Central, but she had just accepted a job in Hill City, 25 miles away. "My new principal trusts his teachers as professionals," she said, "and I have been overwhelmed by the welcome and support that I received at all levels of administration, including the superintendent and school board. They appear to work together and like each other - something that hasn't been true in Rapid City for several years."

There was little noticeable public support in Rapid City for the bans. At the May 17 school board meeting, 19 residents spoke during the public comment period. Fourteen of them - students, parents and teachers - were against the book ban. Three people, only one of them with children in the district, spoke in favor. Of the 25 teachers in the district I talked with, none had had more than one or two instances of parents objecting to texts they have taught.

I reached out to all three high school principals, none of whom answered my emails, though Talley later responded to an email from The Post and declined to address specific details. Kate Thomas provided a statement similar to the one issued by the board in May. "No book has been banned by the Rapid City Area School District," she wrote. "Once the books were placed on the surplus list and the Board was provided a copy of the books, the Board had concerns about selling/giving the books away if the books might be considered harmful to minors, given the sexually explicit nature found in at least one of the books (pictures depicting adults engaging in sexual activity)."

Where do things go from here? It depends. The school board recently indicated that it will seek a way to discard the books without destroying them. Fine, but will the teachers of Rapid City risk another battle with their principals and school board? They might assign challenging books again, or they might, understandably, save their energy for other issues - like keeping their students and themselves safe from mass shootings.

So far there are some troubling indicators that the new school board's posture will have long-term effects. At Central High School, there have been efforts to fill the position vacated by Mueller. In May, a candidate known by members of the English department was interviewed for the opening, and there was much excitement about hiring her. But after a group interview with teachers and Talley, in which she "knocked it out of the park," according to one faculty member, Talley requested a second, private interview. "This was unusual," said the candidate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, told me. She said that the principal pressed her on her views about the book controversy and that his questions left her offended and unsettled. In the end she withdrew her candidacy and took a job two and a half hours away. (Talley declined to answer a question about the interview.)

The school board, though, continues to push ahead. Before its June 6 meeting, it circulated a new document called the "Parents/Guardians/Students Rights in Education Policy." The document asserted that "Parents are the primary caretakers of their child's education" and listed six rights of parents. Most of these rights had been in school materials for years, but now there was a new one, "Right #6." It read: "Parental/guardian knowledge and consent is for ALL LGBTQ/gender identity related discussions, handouts, videos, or online/printed materials except in mandatory reporting situations."

The board chose not to vote on the document at that meeting, but it did invite a local pastor to speak. According to two of those who attended, he talked about returning the Bible to the classroom and condemned kids who identify as trans. One of the attendees was Emily Vigil, a local fifth-grade teacher whose daughter, a high school student, identifies as trans. "It was the most bizarre spectacle I've ever witnessed," Vigil said. "I was shaking, crying and looking around in complete confusion. How was this appropriate for a school board meeting?"

I asked her if she'd considered leaving teaching. "I absolutely love my school, students and families," she said, "but I've thought multiple times of leaving teaching this year. The bottom line is we need the health insurance."

Meanwhile, teachers who can leave are leaving.

On June 16, Bubac tendered her resignation. "My name and even my entire course content is being made public, which is fine," she said, "but I know the public scrutiny will continue. I'm tired of the fear-based decision-making." She accepted a position at Western Dakota Technical College. "I've heard multiple teachers on my floor and in other departments express their desire to leave their positions if they could find an alternative," she said.

Bubac's teaching position, along with 87 others in the Rapid City school district, remains vacant.

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A South Dakota school district planned to destroy Dave Eggers's novel. He went to investigate. In early May I discovered that my book " The Circle" had been pulled from high school reading lists in Rapid City, S.D. It was one of five books - four novels and a memoir - that were deemed inappropriate for high school seniors.

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Children in the Garden: On Life at a 3,100-Mile Race - Longreads

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Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.

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A personal/informative researched essay... you won't forget it.

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A personal/informative researched essay... you won't forget it.

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A few years ago on a gorgeous June day, I found myself in a windowless bathroom with forget-me-not wallpaper, my butt on a toilet, without any good reason to be there. It was a standard mothering move. Beyond the door, I could hear my two small kids laughing and eating cereal, so I stayed in this little space, smartphone in hand. In an hour, I was headed to a bowling alley with my kids, both of whom could now walk through a doorway on their own. And this was a brilliant new development, not just for the 2-year-old who'd learned to walk at the standard age, but for the 4-year-old, Fiona, who'd spent the past three and a half years in physical therapy striving toward this lofty goal. Forty-five percent of people with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome walk , said the report when I first got her diagnosis. Her ability to walk meant I no longer had to consider wheelchair or stroller accessibility. Her ability to walk independently meant she could navigate the tight turns around a bowling ball return without having to steer a clunky walker. So I was taking my kids bowling, as soon as I stopped pretend-peeing and reading on my phone.

I was reading a friend's blog post about a recent appointment with her counselor. As soon as she mentioned her son, who has the same chromosomal syndrome as my daughter, she began to cry.

The therapist asked, "Why do you always cry when you talk about him in here?"

was the therapist's office, maybe a subdued room with sage walls and elephant statuettes. , my friend pushed her 4-year-old son in a wheelchair.

I put my hand over my mouth. The windowless bathroom. The forget-me-not wallpaper. I burst into tears.

For bodies that don't fit into a certain mold, for bodies we call disabled, can be a treacherous space. has steps where you need a ramp. has strobe lighting that could make you seize. writes stories over your body ( she's sad, broken, wrong ) when you just need toilet paper.

For parents of kids with disabled bodies, can be exhausting. It maintains chipper myths about babies that your child breaks. What's with that feeding tube? It tosses questions at your feet like it's throwing you something between flowers and rotten fruit. Why's she so small? What happened? What's wrong? You answer with a smile, or you answer with fatigue, or you turn your head because none of your business .

is risky. Your son might sit in a classroom led by a teacher who doesn't believe he can learn. Or your daughter might need medical care from a doctor who thinks she's a tragedy.

is inconvenient. The doorway isn't wide enough for your adaptive stroller. The wood chips of the town's only playground are terrible for wheelchairs. The librarian concludes public story time with a craft that requires scissors, and you must now serve as your child's occupational therapist, back hunched, palms sweaty, enabling the arduous work of cutting paper.

is not exactly designed for your kind.

* I use both person-first and identity-first language in this essay. As a nondisabled person, I don't have a right to claim an identity for someone, so I err on the side of identity-first language until I know a person's preference - and my daughter hasn't indicated one. I also use identity-first language to stand with disability activists who argue that linguistic acrobatics to avoid the word "disabled" are a manifestation of our culture's ableism. We do not say, for instance, "I am a person with femaleness." #saytheword

Which is why spaces are so delightful. And it's why, especially in early parenting, I often lingered in them for longer than I needed. Idling in the bathroom. Struggling to leave the house. applies little pressure. asks no questions. often lets you and your kin be as you are.

No, of course not , the doctor might have corrected. Inside he'd likely think, Yes, of course there's something wrong , and then he'd recite the long list of diagnoses in her medical file: epilepsy, hypotonia, hydronephrosis, scoliosis, developmental delay....

Things her medical file has never listed: loves coloring, loves cheese, rocks a Converse sneaker, appreciates jalapeños, finds the beat, will increase speed tenfold for a turn at the swing.

can slide too quickly into another concept: . There's a prevalent Hollywood cliché (which bears no resemblance to real-life statistics) that disabled people wish to die. I didn't need a child with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome to spot this cliché; I'd noticed it years before I had Fiona. Million Dollar Baby : a female boxer triumphs in fight after fight only to break her neck, end up quadriplegic, and ask her coach to help her kill herself; he obliges. Me Before You : a grumpy guy in a wheelchair is hell-bent on committing suicide, then falls in love with his caregiver who tries to show him that life is worth living. He kills himself anyway, because, well, you know, wheelchairs. The films are dramatic expressions of the old, ableist assertion that I'd rather die than live like that.

What I didn't realize until having Fiona is that if a person is intellectually disabled, a parent's feelings often become a barometer for their kid's worth. What my friend and I have known, without ever we've known, is that our culture judges the worth of our kids by judging our contentment. I hadn't named this until I sat in the bathroom and read my friend's blog post on my phone, but along with all the obstacles to surmount or circumnavigate or abandon, obliges us to offer our cheer. Are we happy? If so, then maybe the lives of our children aren't tragic. Out there I have to smile.

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down , Anne Fadiman tells the story of Hmong child Lia Lee, who has severe epilepsy. It's a highly lauded book, and for good reason. But midway through, Lia suffers a massive seizure, nearly two hours long, and goes from a happy, hyperactive child to a mostly unresponsive quadriplegic. "Vegetative state," the doctors said, and I cringed, eager for Fadiman to take the phrase to task. Because Fadiman had thus far done a beautiful job revealing the cultural biases of both the Hmong family and their Western doctors, I figured she'd unveil the ableism inherent in ever likening a human to a carrot or a beet. I thought of Martin Pistorius, who spent 12 years in an unmoving body that doctors assumed was also "as good as not there, a vegetable," but as he says years later in his TED talk , "I was aware of everything."

Fadiman fails here. She doubles down on the doctors' sentiment, offering this description of patients in so-called "vegetative states": "pasty-skinned carcasses with slack mouths, hair like straw, bodies that smelled of urine even after they were bathed." . The word cuts. It describes shells in which humans once lived. It should not be used to describe actual humans, still living. Fadiman agrees with the family when they think Lia's soul is gone.

At this point in the story, Fadiman pivots to the mother, oh the mother, and how she adapts to her child's altered life. Fadiman paints some beautiful portraits. The mother lovingly washes her daughter once or twice a day. The mother wears her daughter in a hand-embroidered cloth carrier. The mother feeds her daughter spoonful after spoonful of rice and then kisses her rice-covered face. "Sometimes I thought: this is not so terrible," writes Fadiman. Mid-page, I thought Fadiman might lean toward valuing Lia's new, altered life. Admittedly, she'd do so through the trope of Lia's gifts to nondisabled people. Look at how much love she brings her family . But is certainly better than
Out there we all have to smile.
Happiness is an encouraged performance in America whether you're disabled or not. By analyzing photographs, Stanford psychology professor Jeanne Tsai found that U.S. leaders are over six times more likely to display "open, toothy smiles" than Chinese leaders. This same smile, what Tsai calls "the sign of American happiness," also appears more frequently in American children's stories and women's magazines than in East Asian counterparts. "A lot of immigrants have talked to me about how exhausting it is being in the United States," "because you have to smile all the time."

The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. ... It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities ... turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents and of any other children they may have.

Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In those circumstances, the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against, killing it.

Singer, whose book Practical Ethics is in its third edition, at one point suggests that his argument about murdering babies applies to disabilities that make a child's life "so bleak" that it's "not worth living." (How would anyone determine a life "not worth living"? And who gets to decide such a thing?) But then he argues that hemophiliacs too could be justifiably killed in infancy because a woman will only have so many children, and the hemophiliac child might prevent her from having another, healthier baby. "It is ... plausible to suppose that the prospects of a happy life are better for a normal child" than for a hemophiliac, he writes.

What I didn't realize until having Fiona is that if a person is intellectually disabled, a parent's feelings often become a barometer for their kid's worth.

But the bigger issue is this: Why should a person's happiness - or lack thereof - be used in proving their right to live? And it's not just Singer who delivers this message. Here's disabled writer Nancy Mairs on the subject, from "On Being a Cripple": "In our society, anyone who deviates from the norm had better find some way to compensate. Like fat people, who are expected to be jolly, cripples must bear their lot meekly and cheerfully. A grumpy cripple isn't playing by the rules. Early on I vowed that, if I had to have MS, by God I was going to do it well. This is a class act, ladies and gentlemen. No tears, no recriminations, no faint-heartedness."

You'll hear parents of kids with disabilities negotiate this pressure to be happy all the time when they describe their children. "He has Down syndrome, and he's nonverbal," a father will say, "but he's happy!" Or a mother will say, "She has cerebral palsy, and she doesn't walk, but she's brought us so much joy!" We can't fault the parents. They add this caveat of happiness because they know it carries necessary currency.

But this can be exhausting. It turns happiness into a rhetorical strategy, and makes the faces of disabled people and their caregivers a walking argument that should never have to exist in the first place.

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In December 2015 , three years into the blog, the disability-themed online venue The Mighty published a satirical article called "Introducing: Meltdown Bingo." In it, an autistic parent of an autistic child used a bingo card meme to make light of her son's meltdowns. Readers were rightfully outraged, blasting the article for objectifying a kid's suffering. (It was eventually taken down .) Critics also noted The Mighty's slant toward publishing, as blogger Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone put it, " warrior mommy blogger content ... focused on bemoaning how hard it is to parent a child with a disability. ... This is a dangerous narrative."

The outrage fueled important conversations about disability representation ( #CrippingTheMighty ). But articles also popped up admonishing parents for writing about their kids at all. In an article published soon after, the advocacy website Ollibean suggested that parents should not write about their children if they aren't able to offer consent , a principle that would eradicate the stories of certain intellectually disabled people, pushing them and their caregivers - disproportionately women - to the unwritten, invisible margins. During the years that I wrote the blog, Fiona could not offer me consent, and one of the things I often wrote about was our very efforts to help her communicate so she could loudly disagree with me. But that took time - many years with therapists and a speech device.

The challenges of parenting a disabled child - "the prejudice and ableism, fighting systems for an equal education, equal and accessible medical care, accessibility, insurance coverage for a new wheelchair or communication device," the Ollibean article noted - are injustices built into a system that needs to change. This is 100% true. But the quote fell under the subheading , "It's Not Your Disabled Child, It's the System." In other words, parenting a kid with disabilities isn't ever hard because of the inherent difficulties of a disability.

It was not hard, for instance, taking my infant daughter to a swallow study (to make sure she wasn't dying from her own spit) and two kidney reflux exams (to make sure these vital organs weren't at immediate risk of failure). It was not hard spending four years helping her learn to walk, or three years helping her tiny, fine-motor-limited fingers navigate a robust communication device so she could tell us what she wanted to eat. Likewise, it was not hard when my husband and I hovered over her body as she jerked in convulsions, her eyes pried open by erratic brain synapses, and it was not hard to check the clock while we did this. More than five minutes, and a seizure can cause brain damage.

And yet, if I do say it was hard, then I am fueling, as Logsdon-Breakstone put it, "a dangerous narrative." I'm risking the chance that people will see my kid, my glorious beautiful curly-haired feisty stubborn rascal of a kid, and think, That mom's unhappy; that kid's life is tragic .

Tell too much of a certain kind of a truth, and I could risk further deepening the pervasive story that kids like mine were the B word: burden.

It wasn't a conscious thing, the smiling, until I read my friend's story while sitting in the forget-me-not-wallpapered bathroom. But when happiness becomes a rhetorical move, it's a lot less fun than regular happiness. "The freedom to be happy," writes Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness , "restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy."

In " Special Olympics and the Burden of Happiness ," Lawrence Downes of the New York Times argues that Special Olympics doesn't give itself the freedom to be unhappy either. Downes describes the hours-long medal ceremony at the 2015 World Games as a "cascade of triumphant moments" and a "carefully thought-out strategy" where music swells and the crowd cheers as athletes receive their awards. According to Downes, the organization intentionally uses joy as a rhetorical strategy to advocate for the healthcare, education, and other rights of people with intellectual disabilities. The article acknowledges the global plight of people with intellectual disabilities, many of whom are denied an education, sequestered in institutions, and suffer abuse and neglect. If Special Olympics is trying for a revolution of sorts, "its revolution is televised, happily," writes Downes, "on ESPN."

In March 2009, President Obama told Jay Leno of The Tonight Show about his recent bowling score of 129. "It was like Special Olympics or something," with a laugh. Before the show even aired, he was on the phone, apologizing to chairman Timothy Shriver. According to Shriver, Obama invited the athletes to the White House to school him in the sport and "help him improve his score." If the silence in news reports is any indication, the match never happened.

When we got into the lobby, my heart sank: The lanes about 50 meters ahead were dark like a nightclub. Red and blue and yellow laser beams flashed across the floor, the ball returns, the scoreboards, and the seats. Pop music blasted from above.

From the shoe rental desk, my friend Kristy, Fiona's godmother, came to us with a worried expression. "I'm sorry," she shouted over the music. "They just turned them on."

I exhaled. Kristy had called in advance to be sure, and the guy on the other end had said no, they didn't do laser bowling during the day.

I paused, standing near the entrance, trying to figure out what to do. "It's not like she's had seizures from strobe lights before," I said, recalling the EEG where a technician flashed a light in Fiona's face and measured her brain waves. "It's just ... it's a risk." Further inside, I watched the laser lights spin around, casting erratic, broken-up rainbows. New seizure triggers can emerge without warning in people with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome.

We rented our shoes and paid for a lane. The red and blue and yellow beams swirled around us. Miley Cyrus blared. "You wanna go first?" Kristy shouted two feet from my face. Any farther and I wouldn't have heard her. Her teeth glowed white from the blacklight. I went after Fiona, who was toddling down the lane, ready to walk its length. The bottoms of her Converse sneakers glowed.

Neither would they have seen Fiona seize, because - thank God - she didn't. And they probably would not have seen me smile much, either. But if I had smiled that day, it would have glowed bright as an incandescent bulb.

In the summer of 2020, I published a memoir, Raising a Rare Girl . How could I write a book about Fiona that avoided the trap of the "my kid's so happy" narrative? Because it turns out, my kid happy - often exceedingly so. Fiona, now age 9, has way more joie de vivre than me. Though not yet a swimmer, she plows her body into ocean waves and screams with delight. She yawps for joy at the mention of Kit Kats. She is really, really stoked to go for walks around the block. She and my old college roommate would get along smashingly. And yet a story that emphasizes the "look, my kid is happy!" narrative would lodge her right into the very pressure Nancy Mairs identifies: "In our society, anyone who deviates from the norm had better find some way to compensate."

And how could I write a book that also avoided the "my kid is so hard" narrative? Because that's true, too.

Because loving someone has never been so hard.

Because loving someone has never been so hard.

What I ask is that my answer doesn't matter in determining her worth.

Heather Lanier's memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her recent essays appear in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Off Assignment. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University. You can find her on Instagram at @heatherklanier.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands Illustrator: Ashanti Fortson Fact-checker: Nora Belblidia

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A few years ago on a gorgeous June day, I found myself in a windowless bathroom with forget-me-not wallpaper, my butt on a toilet, without any good reason to be there. It was a standard mothering move. Beyond the door, I could hear my two small kids laughing and eating cereal, so I stayed in this little space, smartphone in hand.

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The way a fire starts is simple. When a flammable material is exposed to a high enough temperature and fed by an oxidizer, you get flame. It's called the fire triangle, the chemical combination of oxygen, fuel, and heat, which generates the first wisp of burning. Take one of these elements away, and the fire goes out, or doesn't ignite in the first place.

Then there's fire behavior, or the way it moves. By nature, fire seeks to keep itself alive. It unfurls from the center of its own heat and consumes a forest or structure or city by way of the trinity of fuel, weather, and topography. If more combustible material can be licked by flame, and wind can direct and feed its heat, a fire can rage. It can burn so hot it melts aluminum. It can move so fast that it destroys a town in minutes. It can clog the air with so much smoke, there is nothing left to breathe.

Fire cannot exist or move without all of these elements in place and in the right proportions. Like anything, fire is a set of conditions ignited by chance. It fuels change.

This is where it stops being simple.

When the Camp Fire started, Berlin was dark and cold and wet. It was November 8, and I was sitting at the kitchen table of a small sublet apartment when my dad sent a photo to our family chat of a massive cloud of black smoke ringed with a burning glow, hanging over the Northern California canyon I call home.

Big fire moving from Concow to Paradise , he wrote. Jumped from 500 to 1000 acres in an hour. High winds.

My mom added: It'll have to get through Paradise to get us, so we're most likely ok.

I grew up in wildland, an open patch of pasture ringed by woods in the hollow of Butte Creek Canyon outside of Chico, California. On top of the canyon's southeastern ridge sat the tiny town of Paradise, an inconsequential detail for most of my life. In the hot and dry summers of this corner of the world, wildfire shaped my life as much as a river carves a canyon. To assume this one was not an immediate threat was not ignorant. We'd made it through so many.

A river carved a canyon and that canyon is carved in me. From childhood, I've known each of its curves like I know the shape of my own body.

But this one was different. The fire reached Paradise and blew through the city before anyone knew what to do. In my darkening apartment, I watched videos from inside the firestorm fill Facebook, and read reports of people fleeing their burning cars on the Skyway, which was the only road out of town and ran along the ridge that made my canyon. I refreshed fire maps, watching red blots edge closer to the thin lines drawing the shape of home. I fell into a panic, updating my family of the evacuation orders while they packed to flee - my parents from my childhood home and one of my sisters from her own canyon home, where she lived with her fiance and 1-year-old daughter.

Two hours after my dad's text, Paradise was gone. The fire tipped down into the canyon. My family left.

In Chico, residents and evacuees watched noon turn dark. Cold settled over the city as the thick, toxic smoke from the fire blotted out the day. Street lamps switched on. Cars drove with headlights. Ash fell like snow. The sun peeked through the sky like a blurry orange moon.

On the other side of the world, I looked at this darkness through the window of my computer screen, a wall of night behind me. For a brief moment in time, California and Berlin looked not unalike: two nights pulling at the edges of an expanse of light stretched over the earth. And me - a tether between the two, taut with the force of home.

When asked why I moved to Berlin, I start with the simple answer: I fell in love with the city. But that's just part of the story. I had to fall out of love with something else first.

After spending the first 20 years of life in Chico, I moved a few hours away to Oakland, where I spent nearly a decade. At the time, Oakland's popular image didn't extend much further than crime reports. But I loved it, for a while. It was cheap. It held the tinge of possibility without the cliches of New York and L.A. and San Francisco. I spent my first years working in cafes, going to school, renting small rooms in big homes, going to parties in warehouses.

But then, things changed. Foreclosed craftsman bungalows were bought cheap and flipped at a massive profit to new Silicon Valley spillovers. Barbershops and historic delis shuttered to make way for fusion restaurants and third-wave coffeehouses. Landlords kicked out old tenants and gave their homes to the highest bidder. In 2014, the New York Times the "Brooklyn by the Bay," and the city took on a similar veneer of cool. It became a caricature of itself, and (mostly white) young people flooded the city along with (mostly white) tech commuters, forcing out the historically black and lower-income residents that had been there for decades.

The rest is well-known: The Bay Area is now one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and the ensuing housing crisis has caused a chain reaction of uninhabitability. By the time I left, my boyfriend and I were paying $2,850 for a duplex apartment in East Oakland and called ourselves lucky for even finding a place. As one writer : "Oakland in every aspect of the word is no longer what it used to be "

Then there were the fires.

In 2015, the illegally converted warehouse turned artist space known as the Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut caught fire in the night and burned. Two people were killed. One was Davis, my sister's ex-boyfriend, who was like my brother. We called ourselves cosmic twins.

Less than two years later, the illegally converted warehouse turned artist space known as the Ghost Ship caught fire during a party and burned. Thirty-six people were killed. One was my friend from back home, Donna. Everyone in my extended community lost their people.

Later, arsonists started fires across the city in the night, charring new developments that longtime residents didn't want.

The city was at war with itself, burning with its own greed. A housing crisis, stagnant wages for most, apathetic city officials - pushing everyone out. A place, reshaped.

I move to Oakland, young and naive. I pay the high rent. I buy the $12 cocktails. I feed the flames. I move across the world. We change the world's shape, then wonder why it burns.

Eventually, I left. I got rid of a lifetime of possessions, ended a five-year relationship, bought a one-way ticket across the world. I kept saying I was burning down my life. In reality, I'd endured a slow-burn kind of disaster, the kind that I absorbed into my life ember by ember almost without notice until it burned me out.

The Camp Fire was set off by electrical transmission lines belonging to Pacific Gas & Electric, the state's largest electricity utility company. On that day - one with high winds and high heat - the company was supposed to shut off power to prevent wildfire. It didn't. One spark and then the rest.

At its height, the fire moved at 80 acres per minute, equivalent to a football-field length of town or forest or pasture per second. In the ensuing chaos, hundreds of people were marked missing, and stayed that way for weeks. The death toll steadily rose. The fire burned so hot that it was hard to even find the remnants of bodies. I heard stories of final phone calls, half-burned animals hanging on to life, a woman who had just given birth and took refuge in the garage of an evacuated house while nurses fought the flames. But still, the fire raged on. The winds changed course, firefighters were stretched thin. In my own small corner of the disaster, it was days before we knew if anything had survived.

On the other side of the world, day became a footnote to the long northern nights. When I should have been sleeping, dreams of fire burned me awake. I'd check my text messages, call home, refresh Twitter for updates. During my day, California slept. I wandered in a haze beneath the ashen sky, unmoored, waiting for something to happen. And what happened was, I no longer knew what was home.

I used to live in a tiny cabin behind my parent's home. Set back in the pasture across the stream that ran through our property in spring, I felt alone. I liked it this way. Close to wildland, on the edge of our human sphere.

At night I would sometimes hear foxes yowling with the sound of women screaming. They too lived a solitary life.

It was thought that the Sacramento Valley red fox that populated my homeland was an introduced species. Researchers only recently discovered that they're native, related to the nearly extinct High Sierra fox, whose natural habitat lies farther north. Both are endangered. Loss of habitat, hybridization.

Not long after the Camp Fire, I learned about Berlin's foxes. Influenced by human habits, they've become scavengers and have adopted an urban life and their population has exploded. Now there are more fox dens within the city limits than in the surrounding forests. In the deep of winter, I spotted my first one. It skittered like a flame across the bare field of snow behind my building. It was midday, but the sky was low and dark. I held my breath until it disappeared like a flash of something familiar.

I spent the winter wondering why we're both here.

In 1983, my parents drove from the Bay Area to visit their new land, traveling into a mass of smoke that ended in the canyon. Flames consumed the northwestern ridge across from their home, the picturesque one that gave their canyon valley its view. It was the Fourth of July, and they stood on their new patch of land and watched as the fire crackled up pine trees, their cones popping like dazzling, sinister fireworks.

In 1999, a fire slipped over that same ridge and burned the butte for days. I remember standing at the end of our driveway and watching flames move slowly across the blackening rockface, taking down trees. The firemen stationed themselves in our field. When it ended, the ridge was bare.

In 2007, a fire careened up the canyon in a matter of hours and burned that ridge again. I was leaving for Mexico for a month and put a box of my things by the door in case my parents had to evacuate while I was gone.

In 2017, I woke up in Oakland to brown skies. In the night, the Tubbs Fire had torn through Santa Rosa - a city 58 miles north - and consumed neighborhoods in minutes. It was described over and over as a fireball. Twenty-two people were killed and 5,600 structures were destroyed. It held the title as the most destructive wildfire in California for just one year.

I watch it all burn with numb recognition, my affinity with my home replaced with an intimacy with its destruction. California is burning. I'm not sure that will ever not be true.

The day after the Tubbs Fire, another one started a mile from my sister's home. She packed, swept the dry leaves off the roof of the house, waited. After it was over, I wrote about imagining the fire ripping through her house, then tearing across the canyon to reach my parent's home.

Six weeks before the Camp Fire, I spent my last few days in the U.S. at my childhood home. At 3 a.m., a neighbor tore up our driveway, flashing his headlights, honking and yelling that there was a fire on the ridge behind us. My parents and I panicked, started making a plan. My dad called a local firefighter who told us the fire was between us and Paradise, but small - nine acres and nearly contained, nothing to worry about. We wandered around the house in the dark for a few hours wondering what to do, feeling for wind. At daybreak, I fell asleep, a faraway city smoldering on the edge of my dreams.

My current home rests a block from the most contentious point of what was the Berlin Wall. Running along Bernauer Strasse, the barrier ran flush against buildings on the East Berlin side of the street - my side of the street. After the wall rose overnight, residents in these border buildings tried to flee. They slid down ropes or jumped out of windows. Eventually, the buildings were evacuated. Residents were forced to resettle deeper into East Berlin, and the windows and doors of the buildings were bricked up. A second wall was built some 160 yards away, and the space between the two became known as the Death Strip. It was full of traps, guard dogs, and obstacles, lined with watchtowers where the guards were ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to cross.

It's here that the first East Berlin defector was killed, and many more after. It's also here where the most successful escape tunnels were dug, and where protests and acts of resistance were staged.

The wall stood for nearly 30 years. In that time, storylines stopped. Lives were reshaped. Everything changed. A history folded in on itself, barred from unfurling.

What goes unwritten in the undone history of disaster?

In the first four days of its burning, the Camp Fire becomes the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. By the time it ends three weeks after the first spark, flames scorched an area of 240 square miles and destroyed over 18,800 structures . people died, including one in my canyon. A year later, one person is still missing.

In the canyon, some 80% of the homes burned. My sister's was one of them. My childhood home was not.

In the absence of firefighters, a group of men I grew up with in our small, close-knit community went into the fire and fought it themselves . They saved my homeland. Black scars of the fire's path trace the back edge of my parent's property, drawing an unfinished storyline: It was supposed to burn.

Back in Berlin, I slip into the space formed by the dissonance of relief and grief.

There is a ghost in all of this: the man I was dating when the fire started. When I woke up in the middle of the night to call my family or check the news, he woke up with me. When my family was certain our home was gone and I sat on the couch with my dad on the phone in one hand and my head in the other, he sat next to me, arms around my shoulders.

We'd only been seeing each other a few weeks when the fire came. We met and fell fast. He told me on our second or third date that I felt like home and I settled into it. Then, before the fire was even out, he ended things, saying he wasn't emotionally capable of being in a relationship. I stayed in bed for days, not sure if I was crying about the fire or the loss or home, realizing eventually they were all the same. A triangle of pain.

When I returned to California for Christmas, I found out through social media that he was back with his ex, captioning photos with proclamations about how his love for her felt like home.

Before flying back to Berlin, I saw the boyfriend I'd left when I burned down my life. Needing to be wanted, or wanting to be home, I asked him if he missed me. It's complicated , he said.

When I wonder enough about the foxes, I write to a conservation officer at one of the oldest and largest environmental associations in Germany. I ask if I can talk to her about them and, saying her English isn't very good, she offers to answer a few questions by email.

I start with the basics.

Are the foxes native?

What's their breed?

What is their population?

I move to the deeper questions, the ones I return to when the foxes fill my mind.

Are the foxes no longer nocturnal? Is it healthy for them to be out during the day?
They've learned that there is no danger from humans. They can hunt during the day or gather food.
Is the city doing anything to reintroduce them to the wild or to control their population?
No.
Are they being allowed to exist as they are?
Yes.
And finally, the complicated one.

Do you think the foxes would be happier if they were not urbanized?
The foxes have decided to do it themselves! Obviously, they can live well! They have adapted well!
I read the email on my phone while standing over the stove in my kitchen, making soup. Is it a decision when loss of habitat forces a move? Is adaptation anything more than survival? And is survival truly a life?

I eat my soup, contemplate belonging.

Would you be happier if you were not urbanized?
You decided this yourself.
Does the day sometimes feel like a dream because the other side of the world is shrouded in night?
Yes.
Is this where you belong?
You have adapted well.
When you leave one home and build another, which is more real?
This is not known.
Before there was a canyon there was a river. Starting as an ancient mudflow, the water spent millennia washing its bed of basalt and sandstone until it carved the cragged and fractured walls that became the brackets around my home. A river carved a canyon and that canyon is carved in me. From childhood, I've known each of its curves like I know the shape of my own body. Every tree, every cavern, every structure. Every bend in the river, every story buried behind the seen.

When I come home six weeks after the fire, I find my geography unstitched. It's a disorienting drive up the winding canyon road. Each burned lot, each fallen tree, undoes the map in me. I knew to expect the mangled remnants of houses and the blackened, barren buttes, but I failed to imagine the disorientation that comes with the absolute reshaping of home. I see new angles of the river I never saw before, revealed by burned-out groves of trees, new caves scooped out of the buttes. When we visit the site of my sister's home, I can't reconcile the wreckage with what stood before. The floor plan suddenly seems too small, the lot a wholly different terrain. Further up the canyon, my mind tries to restring the historic covered bridge between the banks of the river, but the space where it stood for 130 years remains blank. It's like encountering a ghost, or the film negative to an image. Reality untethers.

For a brief moment in time, California and Berlin looked not unalike: two nights pulling at the edges of an expanse of light stretched over the earth. And me - a tether between the two, taut with the force of home.

But then I think about Berlin, a city seething with ghosts and built on the bones of destruction. How I scrawl my own map of the place, overlaying my history on top of the invisible ones floating where a wall or a building once stood. How many missing monuments hang heavy in the air or in memory, easy for me to ignore. We forget what has changed, a dissonance between and . Imperceptibly, the river is still carving the canyon. History is still reshaping. The maps in us still unfolding.

Less than a year after the Camp Fire, my sister leaves her fiance. They never recover from the grief of the fire. She and her daughter move in with my parents. She struggles against an 8-year-old addiction.

A week later, I learn that my aunt's cancer has progressed. She has to have another surgery. She starts talking about her death.

What do fire, addiction, and cancer have in common? They grow and spread. They seethe. They are a fight you sometimes lose. They destroy.

What do a fox and me have in common? A fox adopts a new life in the day. I transform my day to night. We alter our roots, distortion by force or choice.

Somewhere along the way, I absorb a line from an Audre Lorde poem. Places do not change so much as what we seek in them . What happens when both are true?

Condition: The year Oakland became a national hotspot was the year California's drought became a national emergency. Even then, in 2014, it was the worst drought in 1,200 years, and it stretched on for another five. At the same time, the untenable expense of California's major cities pushes the housing crisis out into the rest of the state. The shortage leads developers to carve into farmland and wildland to build subdivisions. It's a cultural and environmental war, often waged over water. State officials make plans to build new dams. Southern California vies for Northern California's water supply. Trees die en masse, setting the parched and arid state up to burn. On the edge of the state, rising sea levels threaten to sink cities. People continue to water their lawns.

Condition: The year I was born was the year the Berlin Wall fell. After three decades of war with itself, a reconciliation. In the haste to erase the influence of the East, the West tears down the barrier along with buildings and monuments that signified the regime. The wall becomes a ghost, haunting only memory. The city breaks open with emptied spaces, which fill with the influence of a new culture: clubs, galleries, collectives. It rises, blooming out of the frenetic need to forget what was.

Condition: The human habit of carving space. Cities built in deserts, water flooding rice fields in the Central Valley, homes edging out and out. A wall divides a city and writes a new history, then buries it beneath another one. I move to Oakland, young and naive. I pay the high rent. I buy the $12 cocktails. I feed the flames. I move across the world. We change the world's shape, then wonder why it burns.

In January, I'm walking home on a rough brick sidewalk strewn with snow when a fox rounds the corner and faces me. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, hold my breath, look around to find myself alone.

In Becoming Animal , David Abram writes about the reciprocal experience between humans and the natural world. When we witness an animal or a landscape, it in turn witnesses us. A mutual sensory perception, reminding us of our connection. "The terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain," he writes. See and be seen. Be and belong.

Without breaking his stride, the fox continues in my direction, then steps off the sidewalk into the street to pass me. I turn my body to witness him go by. The fox keeps his eyes forward. He steps back onto the sidewalk, rounds the opposite corner, and disappears. See and be seen. Be and belong.

I start walking again, knowing I'm heading home.

Just two weeks before the one-year anniversary of the Camp Fire, the cycle repeats itself. In October, wildfires consume California from north to south, even amid rolling blackouts meant to protect the state from more disaster. In the Bay Area, the fires edge into urban zones once considered safe from the yearly threat of burning. It's the new normal, come to greet us with unceasing wind, uncontained flames, smoke-choked air, and the declaration of a statewide emergency.

I watch it all burn with numb recognition, my affinity with my home replaced with an intimacy with its destruction. California is burning. I'm not sure that will ever not be true.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you about the regenerative power of fire, how from destruction comes regrowth. This is the part where I say that fire is necessary and preventative, essential to the lifecycle of ecosystems, clearing out and making room, allowing new beings to emerge. It's here that I tell you about the concept of serotiny, the ecological adaptation in which certain plants require a trigger to release their seeds, and how that trigger is often fire, or fire followed by rain. How death is needed for life.

I take this and apply it to my life. I tell you how, on the drive up the canyon in April when I return home after the winter, the buttes are carpeted in neon green and burning with the orange of California poppies. How I stop to take a photo of this fiery bloom and post it on Instagram with the caption like it's some kind of reconciliation. How when I return to Berlin, the trees have grown leaves and the days have lengthened, and I feel at home. How I don't see another fox again. How life after disaster can be like that - you burn it all down to build it back up, and doesn't that make the pain so beautiful?

Imperceptibly, the river is still carving the canyon. History is still reshaping. The maps in us still unfolding.

But I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'll tell you about standing on the Paradise ridge in the depth of summer, star thistle scratching the parched air in the hundred-degree heat. How the only thing I found growing there in the wide median of the highway was 86 white crosses, jutting out of the dusty earth to hold the names of the dead. How each one was covered in flowers and photos, I love you, mom s, and the metal tags of pets that perished with them. I'll tell you how my face burned under the sun while I walked the length of this memorial. How at first I felt numb until something sparked inside me and I cried in the heat. A trigger. A seed.

Instead, I'll tell you that researchers are discovering that some wildfires burn so hot, they destroy the seeds they were supposed to regenerate and the elements that give any surviving seeds a chance, and nothing grows back. That some scars don't heal. That home is not a complete idea, just like a wildfire is not a whole but a collection of small burnings, erratic and fluid. That the chemistry of change has no set conditions.

How sometimes, things are not so simple. But that's when life begins.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler

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Before we start, I invite you to sign up for the Heinemann Newsletter. We send biweekly updates with articles from our blog and podcasts, featuring the latest thought leadership from our authors, and even samples from our latest titles.

Below is a transcript of this episode. Shamari Reid:
It's important to say, "We are humans." I think the book's title is just that declaration that we are humans.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We teach, and we love teaching, and then many of us feel called to do it. But we are humans, and that means a lot of beautiful things, but also a lot of complicated things. The book really is my exploration of all things beautiful and all things complex that comes with being a human, with teaching in the current times.
Edie:
Hi, this is Edie. Welcome back to the Heinemann Podcast. Our guest on the podcast today is author Shamari Reid. His forthcoming book, Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice and Liberation in Schools is a beautiful anecdotal exploration of self-compassion in a demanding profession. This conversation will give you insight into how those explorations became the foundation for a timely, compact book that guides you through the same work of examining self-care, boundaries, expansion and love.

Before we start, I invite you to sign up for the Heinemann newsletter. We send biweekly updates with articles from our blog and podcasts, featuring the latest thought leadership from our authors, and even samples from our latest titles. If you'd like to sign up, visit heinemann.com/newsletter. Now, my conversation with Shamari.

Thanks for being here. It's so nice to be here with you.
Shamari:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Edie:
Well, I was just thinking back to a conversation we had a little bit ago about your ... You've written your manuscript.
Shamari:
Right.
Edie:
It's out of your hands, it's onto the next phase of production.
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Congratulations.
Shamari:
Thank you.
Edie:
And also, I know you've just reread it.
Shamari:
Yeah.
Edie:
I would just love to hear a little bit about that. This moment in time, rereading your manuscript, your writer's journey.
Shamari:
Sure. Sure. Yeah, the reread was a journey of all kinds of emotions and things that I didn't know I would feel.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I think partly because, when I was writing it, I was rereading it all the time. I'm someone, I'll write a paragraph, I might stand up, I'll walk around the house, I'll breath. And I'll go back and read the paragraph again. And then, the first thing that comes to me is the start of the new paragraph.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
So I reread, extend, reread, extend. I thought that I had reread the book and I knew it. Took some time from it, got the whole manuscript back and started rereading it. I thought it would just be a quick read.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And then, I went on the journey of all kinds of emotions. I was like, "I'm going to rewrite that, I'm going to rewrite that. I'm going to rewrite the entire book." So I called my editor and I was like, "It's time to rewrite the entire book."
Edie:
Oh my gosh.
Shamari:
She said, "What? No, we're not doing that." So it's been one of those journeys for me. I'm very much of an iterative, I think, thinker. If I can go back to something just five minutes later, I have a whole new idea.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I'm always about extending, extending, extending. I think part of that was really me letting go. And getting comfortable with and okay with letting go.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Knowing that I'll always have more I want to say.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
I'll always have more I want to share. But right now, what I have said and what I have shared is enough.
Edie:
Yeah. The book, Humans Who Teach.
Shamari:
Yes.
Edie:
Let's talk a little bit about that term. I'd love to hear why you like the term Humans Who Teach.
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Not just teachers, but humans who teach.
Shamari:
Sure. Humans Who Teach just makes sense to the way that I think, and the way that I feel, and the way that I move, and the way that I think about the work that we do. So for me, as a term, I'm realizing how different it is because folks have made me aware, "Hey, not everyone uses that term."
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
But for me, it has always just made sense. I said, many years ago, on a Heinemann podcast, I was talking with Kate and Maggie.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
On the Beyond the Letters.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I just was talking organically about some question and I said, "Well you know, it's human work that we do." It's work that happens in the hearts and minds of young people, that is informed by our own hearts and minds as people and as humans. So I think that's where I began to articulate the idea. However, I've always held close to that idea that we are humans before we are anything else.

I feel like, in this particular moment, a lot of my teacher friends are tired and exhausted, and are not feeling like they are allowed the space to be those things. They feel shame when they say, "Hey, I'm tired." Or, "I'm exhausted." Or, "Parent-teacher conferences were very long today." Not that they were bad, they were just long. But there isn't a lot of space, I feel, for teachers to be human. I think we're expected to be on all the time, and we're expected to be teachers all the time, and to give all the time. But I think the reality is we become empty.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We become dehydrated. We need to be restored. So it's important to say, "We are humans." I think the book's title is just that declaration that we are humans.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We teach, and we love teaching, and then many of us feel called to do it. But we are humans and that means a lot of beautiful things, but also a lot of complicated things. The book really is my exploration of all things beautiful and all things complex that comes with being a human, who is teaching in the current times.
Edie:
Yeah. When you think that that shame, or feeling a little bit ashamed to say, "I'm tired, I'm exhausted," what is that rooted in? I know you speak to that in the book.
Shamari:
I do. It's a social lesson. But in the book, I talk about socialization. What I mean there is just all the things that we learn from birth until we're adults about our society. These are the messages that we receive from TV, from parents, from other teachers, other institutions. One of those messages is, that we received, is that teachers are just supposed to teach. We are just supposed to do and be everything for everyone, all the time, and especially for our students. In many ways, I think we are evaluated and/or our effectiveness maybe even measured based on how much we give to young people.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Of course, we want to be effective. Who doesn't want to do their job well? Teachers want to do a great job. Because we've been taught to believe that doing a great job is going above-and-beyond all the time, that's what happens.

I think that's where the messages come from. It comes from other teachers. It comes in the form of encouragement and praise. It's not always negative. It's just, "Wow, I really admire how you stayed up late working on that. I really appreciate how you didn't take a lunch break today so that you could show up for someone else." That's also a way, I think, in which we encourage that kind of I would say overextension and the idea of having no real work-life-rest integration, work-life balance. That's what I would say it comes from. I think it's perpetuated and maintained when we continue to neglect the humanity of teachers, and talk about them as if they are just robots who can implement curricula, who can teach lessons plans on the drop of a dime.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Even when we are in times of crises, like we are right now.
Edie:
Yes. Yeah. As we begin, by I think first acknowledging that humanity, seems like a vital first step.
Shamari:
Sure, sure.
Edie:
Then, beyond that, I think just as an extension as we grow, there's this self-care piece that comes in. I think, sometimes, that term can feel a little hollow right now. Or another thing to do.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
Another thing for teachers to do.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
What's your vision of self-care? Speak to that.
Shamari:
Sure. I'll tell the story of how I got there. I love stories.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
As anyone who knows, and when you read the book you'll see there are tons of stories all over the place. But there's a story around self-care for me. I love that you mention it being hollow, or being perceived as hollow. It was hollow for me, for a very long time. It was something that I thought only meant over indulgence and things that brought me joy or pleasure.

So when I used to say self-care, it would be like, "Okay, you had a long day, you taught, did a lot. You deserve self-care." What did that mean? I would go home, I would bake brownies, or I would bake chocolate ... I love to bake, by the way. I love food.
Edie:
Me too.
Shamari:
Which I say in the book.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
"I love food."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
I would bake, which was fine, and I would eat everything that was there.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
To the point where I got sick.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I told myself, "This is taking care of yourself though, because it brings you joy, and it brings you great feelings until it doesn't."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
That's the over indulgence. It was my therapist, wow, four years ago, who was asking me about my self-care. I was so excited to say, "Cookies and brownies!" She was like, "Those are great, and I love that you love baking. But over indulgence is not caring for the self." I was like, "But it is. It makes me happy." She was like, "But is it making you well?"

We talked about self-care as being something that contributes to your wellness. The thing that I was doing, in my example, actually wasn't healthy and it wasn't leading to me being physically well, because I was making myself sick. I was just saying to myself that's what self-care was. That is how I learned about it. When I heard people talk about self-care, it was that over indulgence.

Now, what I understand, for me, and I say this across the book, self-care really is about caring for the self.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
I talk about that in three different ways. Caring for yourself physically, so your body. Nutrition, sleep, exercise, stretching, breathing, relaxation, massages. Things that your body actually needs to be well.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Emotional self-care for me, which is a range of things you can do to make sure that you are well emotionally. It's beyond therapy.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yes, therapy is great but there are different kinds of therapy. Different forms of therapy, which are not always traditional. It's talking about what it means to take breathing breaks, which you're not only breathing, but you are processing your emotions. Taking time to check in with your body, to check in with yourself, and seeing where feelings are showing up is a kind of self-care.

Then, I talk about spiritual self-care, which is not connected at all to religion, but more to joy.
Edie:
To joy.
Shamari:
To joy. Joy as a thing that fuels us. The thing that, I think, is so integral to our humanity is joy and this connectedness. It's what makes us us.

That's how I've been reframing self-care, which means that it is ... Sometimes, it's work but it's more so how, it's all about how, we are taking care of ourselves. What are the things that we are doing, and checking in and saying, "Are these contributing to my wellness or not?" I'm not saying all things have to. I still love cookies. I still love brownies. I still bake.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And at the same time, I'm always saying, "Am I being my healthiest self?"
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Am I taking care of myself so that I can show up and love for myself and everyone else that I'm in relationships with, including young people who are my students?
Edie:
Yeah. I feel like some of that work, or the way I perceive it when I read your book, was the self-examination a little bit. Taking that step of self-examination.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
To understand what care looks like.
Shamari:
That's right. And being honest.
Edie:
Yeah, exactly.
Shamari:
And being vulnerable.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
And reflecting. For me, every time I revisit that checking in with self, I discover new things.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
I'm like, "Oh, here's another thing I need to be physically well, that I wasn't aware of a month ago."

But to the point you just made, it is about constantly checking in with yourself and seeing what do you need to be well?
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And only you know that.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
People can encourage and offer examples. But it's really about when you are still, and you've checked in with yourself. And you've asked yourself in a space where you feel safe enough, vulnerable enough to be honest with yourself, "Here are the things that I actually need physically, the things I need emotionally and spiritually to be well." And to lead a life of peace, and love and joy because all humans really deserve that. Even those who teach, especially those who teach.
Edie:
Right. Yeah. I love how you framed that in the being able, with this, being able to show up with love. How have you seen that showing up with love in the classroom lead to liberation?
Shamari:
That's a great question. I love it. So much I could say.
Edie:
I know.
Shamari:
But what I will say is-
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Here's what I will say.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
When I think about love and it's role in relationship deliberation, and how it has shown up in schools in ways that feel justice-oriented, ways that feel that they push us toward the world we all deserve, it comes back to relationships. With yourself and with young people. When love is present, I would like to believe and I've experienced, that it's from that place, that healthier place, that loving place, that we can actually have healthier relationships.

Meaning ... I talked about this a little bit today when I was talking with some other wonderful teachers in a session about the book, and this idea came up of when we get frustrated, when we get annoyed, when we become angry and that being the place from which we engage students. We end up saying and doing things that are not normal for us, but because in that moment-
Edie:
Gosh, it's-
Shamari:
We're just not well.
Edie:
No.
Shamari:
We're not okay.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
For me, love, of love of self and love of other people, means making sure that you are healthy enough and you are well enough, so that every relationship and every action flows from a healthy place and a loving place, and you can actually see people and see students in ways that are not blocked in or filtered by your frustration and by your anger, which are valid. I get it, I get tired, too.
Edie:
Yeah, right.
Shamari:
And frustrated, and annoyed. If I don't check in myself and don't take care of myself, I will begin to engage with young people from that place. And now, I'm bitter.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
And now, I'm jaded. Love keeps us grounded in that, keeps us hopeful, but also keeps us clear so that we can see and engage students from a place that makes sense to our hearts, and not a place of great frustration and great anger, which will happen if we don't take care of ourselves and we don't make sure we're well.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
That's going to happen to any human.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We become irritable, on the edge, et cetera. Which is nothing to be ashamed about, or feel bad about. It's an invitation, I think, to check in and say, "Okay, here's where I am. Something, I need something. What do I need to take care of myself to make sure that I'm not showing up in this way?"
Edie:
Yeah. You touched upon this a little bit in the beginning of the conversation, but how are teachers doing? How are teachers showing up?
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
What are you seeing?
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Oh, yeah.
Shamari:
There's so much.
Edie:
I know.
Shamari:
You know what I think? There's a pattern, it's an unfortunate pattern. But a lot of the educators in my life who I know and who I have known for years, and I trust would be honest and vulnerable with me, have shared that they are tired. These are people who love the work.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And feel called to the work. And want to do the work in ways that are loving, and that are effective, and contribute and move us closer to this world to be, but they're worn out and they're exhausted. That is what I'm hearing.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
In terms of what they need, I think it's space to figure out what they need. I think it is an invitation to say, "Let's pause for just a moment and ask yourselves what do you need?" To be well and to be rested.

But unfortunately, I don't know how often they get invited to check in with themselves. Often, they're invited to take on more work and to do more. They're being hurried and they're being rushed. "Do more faster. Move through that lesson plan faster. Get them ready for the test faster." But we are in a moment right now of various crises, and as humans we're effected. It's heavy. We carry it in the body and it can show up.

I think what they would need is space. It's space to reflect on what they need physically, emotionally and spiritually, as I said earlier. So that's what I'm hearing a lot of teachers in my life complain about, the lack of empathy they're getting from people outside the profession.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
People who don't understand what the work is that we do and who are saying, "Do more, do faster." That's so misguided and misinformed.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We need the same breaks and the same moments of pause that everyone gets. Or, everyone else is encouraged to do. We should not feel bad or that we are neglecting our students because we need a moment to breathe.
Edie:
Yes. Yeah, you wish that for teachers don't you, in your book?
Shamari:
Yeah.
Edie:
Your book is such an invitation to engage in that.
Shamari:
Yeah, just to pause.
Edie:
Yeah, just to pause. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I love that. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey in education.
Shamari:
Oh!
Edie:
Just a little bit.
Shamari:
Yeah, where do I start?
Edie:
Yeah. Start at the beginning.
Shamari:
I will. The beginning, I was not supposed to be a teacher. That was not the dream that people had for my life. Everyone wanted something else from me. I went with that. I was going to be a doctor. I was going to be this heart surgeon, because I always wanted to help people. I thought, I was told, that was the way to help. That was the way to spread kindness, and to spread love, and to care for folks is to work in medicine.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I got this great scholarship in this pre-med program. I was then supposed to go into med school and I hated it. It was awful. I loved the idea that I would be able to help people and impact people's lives, but the day-to-day-
Edie:
And that's a lot of schooling to hate.
Shamari:
It's just a lot. I was like, "Am I going to do this, really? Is this really going to be my story? I don't even like the sight of blood." In lab, we had to do anything with the dissections, I would run out. I failed my labs because I wouldn't go. Not because I couldn't. I was just like, "I don't want to touch any of that and there's blood involved."

I switched then to business, public relations. I was finding myself, trying to figure out how do I love on people in ways that make sense?
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I ended up in public relations. I remember being in class, and someone came, and was talking about some Disney World program. "Internship at Disney World, this number one PR place, public relations place. Come to Disney World and do an internship." I was like, "Sure. What do I have to lose?"
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
So I go to Disney World and I'm in class, learning about something about Disney, and Mickey Mouse comes in. Dressed up, being goofy, being silly. It was so much fun.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I got home and it was like, "But I had class today. Class was fun, and class was incredible. I feel really good. I want to be able to create that feeling for young people." I actually want young people to think about schools in that way. Where if it's Tuesday night and you have my class on Wednesday, you cannot sleep because you're so excited.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Remember the old commercial when the kid was like, "I can't sleep because it's Disney World." I wanted that for schools.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
That pushed me.
Edie:
I love that.
Shamari:
I was like, "I want to be a teacher."
Edie:
Yeah, I love that.
Shamari:
I was like, "I'm not going to be a doctor, I am not going to be a PR professional." I could. "I'm not going to do advertising." I did that for a day. I did music too, and art. "I'm not going to do any of those things. I want to be a teacher." Because not only do I want to create these fun generative spaces, it's a space which I can do all those things. I can think about music, and art, and culture, and language. I can dance, and I can sing, and I can teach. I could do everything that I've ever wanted to do and I can love on young people.

Then, that moved me into education. Then the question was what are you going to teach? I had no idea.
Edie:
Oh my gosh. Did you grow up multilingual?
Shamari:
No.
Edie:
Okay.
Shamari:
Once I decided what I was going to teach, I then went and learned Spanish.
Edie:
Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah.
Shamari:
I was like, "Spanish." I then moved to South America.
Edie:
You did? Ah.
Shamari:
I lived in Argentina.
Edie:
Okay. I was wondering where that came in.
Shamari:
You're like, "Where did you get that?"
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yeah, I moved to South America, to Argentina, in a very small town. Not the capital, because I knew if I went there, I would speak English.

Edie:

Yeah, right.
Shamari:
So I went to a small town and I just immersed myself, and just tried learning Spanish just like that. It was really hard. I spent a lot of days frustrated because I couldn't communicate. It really, I think, also helped me become empathetic and to practice empathy, deep empathy, for people who end up in spaces where everything they know no longer serves them. They're being forced to be and show up in a way that doesn't make sense. That's how I learned it.

I lived in Argentina for a little while. Then, I lived in Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Spain. That was my journey of trying to learn Spanish the best way I could.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
As many dialects as I could.
Edie:
Dialects, yeah. Yeah.
Shamari:
Sure. And it worked. But I became fluent and began using the language then, to think about how to address issues. The first thing I did was worked with folks around citizenship. I was like, "I want to use this language more than just in the classroom. I want to change the world again." Just came back to why I wanted to be a doctor. I do want to actually save lives in a way.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I actually want the world to be better off.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yeah, that was the journey to and through education. Then, I became frustrated as a teacher because I kept being told I couldn't do this, and I couldn't do that. I had all these wonderful, innovative ideas. I was like, "But what if we did this and took a field trip here?" I would always here from administration, "No, that's not what the research says. No, that's not what the people who study this say. No, we don't have any theories about that."

Then, I remember asking the principle, "Well, who is doing the research? Who are these scholars and theories?" They're like, "Oh, academics." I was like, "I want to be one of those." People was like, "What is he talking about?"

Then, I left the classroom to go back to school, to get the credentials so that I could then write stuff. And say, "Here's a theory."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We can do the fun thing, we can talk about love. We can talk about emotion in a school space.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And we should be talking about that, because it's a part of what it means to be humans, and everyone in the school is human. Kids, staff, faculty, et cetera. We are all human. We cannot leave our humanity outside these school walls.

Edie:

So great to share this space with you. Thank you, Shamari.

Shamari:

Thank you.

Edie:

Thanks for tuning in today. For a full transcript and to learn more, please visit blog.heinemann.com.

Shamari Reid (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU. He has taught Spanish, English as a new language, and ELA at the elementary, secondary, and post secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay, and Spain. As a scholar-educator, Shamari's work centers love as a moral imperative in social justice education, and as a path toward culturally sustaining school communities.

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On the Podcast: Humans Who Teach with Shamari Reid

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A guide for centering love, justice and liberation in schools.

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This is a stack of print-ready essays for your classroom.

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This is a stack of print-ready essays for your classroom.

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Some thoughts from a recent craft seminar with award-winning writer Alexander Chee.

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Connect to Readers' Prior Knowledge with Comparison Evidence

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How to Avoid Sharing Misinformation on the War in Ukraine

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Here are warning signs to look for before you retweet.

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writing education literacy reading "mentor texts" english

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Each Mini Moves for Writers video teaches you how to use one professional writing move that will enhance your writing style, argumentation, voice, grammar, or organization. Check out just one to help you master a specific move, or watch multiple videos to make your writing into a professional masterpiece.

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LOVE this... everything about it is smart.

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LOVE this... everything about it is smart.

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The Classroom Essentials Series

A foundational guide to using mentor texts in secondary writing classrooms.

Using mentor texts from a range of high-interest sources and diverse authors can be a real game changer in secondary writing classrooms. Students learn to read like writers, deepening their understanding of quality writing and inspiring them in their own drafting and revision. In this foundational guide, you'll learn the what, why, and how of teaching with mentor texts in small ways as well as large-and discover the power of mentor texts to serve as "writing teachers" alongside you. Allison and Rebekah provide a multitude of annotated examples from professional writers, alongside student samples, to illustrate how mentor texts can teach specific writing skills. Online resources, planning tools, and videos for both teachers and students make A Teacher's Guide to Mentor Texts an instant companion to your lesson plan book.

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A foundational guide to using mentor texts in secondary writing classrooms. Using mentor texts from a range of high-interest sources and diverse authors can be a real game changer in secondary writing classrooms. Students learn to read like writers, deepening their understanding of quality writing and inspiring them in their own drafting and revision.

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1. A Classroom Where Mentors Matter

2. Developing a Mentor Text Habit of Mind

3. Moving from Mentor Texts to Writing Lessons

4. Introducing Students to Mentor Texts

5. Mentors Show Students How to Play

6. Mentors Show Students How to Plan

7. Mentors Show Students How to Draft and Revise

8. Mentors Show Students How to Go Public

9. Mentors Show Students How to Be Independent

This book was written to help you understand the potential that writing with mentors has for your students.

We've organized it into nine chapters that mimic the scaffolded instruction we use to support writers in our own classrooms, beginning with the teacher. As you look at the contents, you'll see that Chapter 1 offers a new way of thinking about mentor texts and the central role they can play in writing instruction. In Chapter 2, we explore what it means to be a teacher who puts her full faith in professional writers and leverages this faith as far as it can go in the classroom. We take you to our most trusted sources for finding mentor texts-sources that never tire and never feel old, sources we promise will excite both you and your students. Finally, we share our criteria for selecting the best mentor texts these sources have to offer.

In Chapter 3, we move into the classroom, offering a practical explanation of how a teacher might move from this trust in professional writers and discovery of rich texts to planning for instruction. In Chapters 4 through 8, we walk you through our work with students and mentors from the first day of school to the last-from the early stages of inspiration to the final moments of publication. We share lessons that demonstrate the enormous potential of mentors at every stage of the writing process.

Finally, we close with a chapter that explains why we teach with mentors at all, because it's the influence of writers that will endure long after our students have left our classrooms. With the help of mentors, we cultivate independence in our writers and help them build lasting writing lives.

You'll notice that chapters are punctuated with brief invitations (A Way In) to engage in the work your students will be doing or to think about your classroom and how the approach we're describing might work for you and your students. For these invitations, we suggest you reserve some space in your writer's notebook or find a small, separate notebook for the jotting and thinking you'll do over the course of this book.

Other chapters will engage you in some observational work: You'll listen as we "teach aloud," offering a window into our thinking as we search for, curate, and plan with mentor texts or talk to students about how to seek help and inspiration from the work of professional writers. And then you'll listen some more to the voices that really matter: the students'. You'll watch some of our students collect thinking, plan, play, draft, start over, write some more-with mentors at their side every step of the way. These students represent a wide variety of ability levels, from the most emerging writers to students who have always wanted to grow up to become writers, but they all have one thing in common: The quality of their writing has been markedly improved by the influence of mentor texts.

Although we've written this book with upper middle to high school-aged students in mind, the mentor text approach to writing instruction is relevant to a wide range of writers at all grade levels. In fact, mentor text instruction has traditionally occurred in the primary grades, well-documented in books like Katie Wood Ray's Study Driven, Ralph Fletcher's What a Writer Needs, and Ruth Culham's The Writing Thief. And while the texts we refer to are geared toward a more mature audience, the philosophy and organizational tools, as well as the ways of talking to students about mentors, are timeless and ageless. We have always taught by the mantra "Good teaching is good teaching," and we use elementary school materials all the time and adapt them for high school.

"Great teachers have an unstoppable drive to figure things out. We imagine that our classrooms might be places where, as Rebekah and Allison say, "the craft of writing is truly studied, not assigned, and we study it together," but we need mentors to show us how. You have two here in your hands. I am certain Don [Graves] would have celebrated these wise, kind, and fearless advocates for young writers. This book vibrates with joy and possibility."--Penny Kittle, from the Foreword

Writing With Mentors is one of the best books I've read on harnessing the power of mentor texts to spur authentic student writing. By helping students to recognize the "writing that is beneath all writing," Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell provide a bank of rich, vibrant reading experiences that immerse young writers into deep study of both technique and genre. This book made me a better writing teacher, and it will make you a better writing teacher, too.-Kelly Gallagher, author of Write Like This

Wow! Writing with Mentors has transformed the way I think about using exemplar pieces. Instead of a writing instruction add-on, Allison and Rebekah show how mentor texts can-no, should- live as the heart-and-soul of a powerful writing classroom. Their vivid portraits of kids at work, sage advice, and plenty of tools, make it all feel possible. This book will mentor my teaching with texts for years to come.-Christopher Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love With Close Reading

For decades, writing teachers have been encouraged to use mentor texts with their students as a way to introduce the elements of author's craft, examine structure, and revel in the joy of language. Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell have updated this advice for our modern age, providing dozens of mentor texts that teachers can use right away. More importantly, they also show us how to harness the power of the Internet to follow authors on Twitter, read the latest commentaries and news via RSS, and listen to podcast reviews of books, films, and music. No longer do we need to find mentor texts only on our book shelves; Marchetti and O'Dell show us many ways to write with the mentors that are part of our-and our students'-daily lives. -Troy Hicks, author of Crafting Digital Writing

Marchetti and O'Dell have woven together a gift for secondary teachers: A book plump with easy-to-access mentor texts, framed in the principles of writing workshop. Useful and extremely current. -Jeff Anderson, author of 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know and Mechanically Inclined

With a pen in one hand to take notes and my Smart phone in the other to scan the QR codes of the numerous mentor texts, I finished the book with an incredible amount of ideas to implement in my classroom and a list of mentor texts to use with my high school students. Writing with Mentors is a long-awaited book that illuminates the power of using mentor texts and gives teachers the tools to move their students to places in their writing beyond where they ever thought they could go.

-Laura LaVallee, English teacher, Portsmouth High School and NH Teacher of the Year finalist

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1. A Classroom Where Mentors Matter 2. Developing a Mentor Text Habit of Mind 3. Moving from Mentor Texts to Writing Lessons 4. Introducing Students to Mentor Texts 5. Mentors Show Students How to Play 6. Mentors Show Students How to Plan 7. Mentors Show Students How to Draft and Revise 8.

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Matt Johnson, Michigan high school teacher, posts an essay a week! What a gift.

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Matt Johnson, Michigan high school teacher, posts an essay a week! What a gift.

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Essay of the Week

Essay of the Week is built around the idea that for students to write better, deeper, and more lively essays, they need to have regular exposure to the essay form in its many shapes and styles. This is why each week, in the tradition of Kelly Gallahger's Article of the Week, I share an Essay of the Week with my students that I post here.

The essays come from a wide range of places and the only criteria is that each must in some sort of way embody the classic Montaigne definition that an essay is an attempt to try on or test out an idea. Beyond that the use of 'I' and contractions are just fine, if not preferred, and having five paragraphs is an option, but it certainly is not the only one. I also try to pick essays that still impart some sort of knowledge about the world in the same way an Article of the Week does.

To learn more about my Essay of the Week, here is an in-depth post. And here are are my Essays of the week for 2022-2023:

February 13-February 17

As a part of our discussions about ChatGPT, we are talking this week about the linguistic traditions we come from and how our linguistic backgrounds and own personal ideolects, or ways of speaking are strengths that we need to lean into in our writing. This excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass, a perennial classic that shows the power of essays, is perfect for making that point while also introducing a perspective on language I've never seen before.

February 6-February 10

My EotW this week is excerpts from an interview with the Teenager Who Is Leading the Smartphone Liberation Movement. We are working on multimedia projects, and many students are doing podcasts. This interview, while not exactly a podcast, is a great example of how to thoughtfully make a case verbally in an interview. Plus it is an interesting, thought-provoking piece from a contemporary about a topic that nearly all of them think about.

January 30-February 3

My EofW this week is a profile of Portland Trailblazer guard Damien Lillard. I chose this EofW because we are talking about character analysis this week, and the piece by Kurt Streeter is a wonderful, deep, well-supported argument about a person. I also have a lot of students who are into basketball in my class, so it also acts as a nod to them and a bridge between the work of class and the work of living in the real world.

January 23-27

We are starting the new semester with a multigenre essay, so to help students wrap their heads around what an essay can be like when the words are accompanied by something else, I plan to share with them two pieces on the role of props in cinema: " Dancing with the Stairs" and " In Praise of Chairs."

January 16-20

After a hiatus for break and finals, EotW is back. Today's EotW takes the same approach as my EotW from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day from last year and shares one of Dr. King's lesser known, but equally important and incredible speeches. This year's is " Our God Is Marching On," delivered in 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama. Outside of "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," I find it to be one of Dr. King's most striking speeches, one in which he explains the history of Jim Crow in a way that I think will connect with students and gives an impassioned argument against those calling for a return to normalcy after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, saying, "The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice."

December 12-19

I feel conflicted about today's Essay of the Week " ChatGPT is Dumber Than You Think" by Ian Bogost. On the one hand, I think talking with students about OpenAI's remarkable Chatbot is important, as it will likely change the world, and Bogost's take is the sharpest I've seen yet. Bogost also engages in some cool argumentative moves that are worth digging into. On the other hand, I'm nervous about being the one to introduce students to a tool that could students could use to plagiarize in other classes. By the end of last week, I found about a quarter of my students already knew about ChatGPT. That will undoubtedly rise this week, and I think it is generally best to talk about such issues openly, as not discussing them doesn't generally mean students won't use ChatGPT; in fact, a thoughtful discussion and an acknowledgement that I know about it, might be the best firewall to its misuse in my classes. What I've settled on is this: I will be using this EofW, but I first discussing it with my administration and fellow English teachers before pulling the trigger.

December 5-December 9

The piece " Father Time Is Chasing Down LeBron James " is a perfect example of how essays can be written about nearly everything, including (in this case) a commercial and a subpar Los Angeles Lakers season. The writing is also really lively and crisp and uses a number of tools we've been talking about recently, ranging from dashes to purposeful fragments.

November 28-December 2

I've been looking for a good fast fashion EotW for some time now. This one by Rachel Greenley captures many of the tensions without coming across as overly preachy, and it has a nice personal side baked into it as well (which is something I'm striving to help my students with right now).

November 21 - November 23

It will need some trimming, but Clint Smith's World Cup primer " How to Cheer for America " is about as good of a blend of narrative and essay writing as I've seen, and the writing makes it a mentor text that I suspect I will return to again and again over the years.

November 14 - November 18

I have been growing more and more interested in using multiple medias in essay writing. This week's Essay of the Week " Film Can Help Us Look Disability in the Eye " is a perfect example of an essay where video is used alongside text, not as a gimmick, but as an essential part of the essay-helping the author to make the point in a way that wouldn't have been possible with text alone.

October 31 - November 4

This week we dive into grammar and language in earnest, and just in time for the conversation is John McWhorter's wonderful new essay " What Ever Happened to 'You'? "-a wonderful deep-dive into how and why language does or doesn't change change. The piece itself is too long and dense for most classes, so I plan to pare it down to something more reasonable, but it is such a great piece for introducing students to the wider discussion of the lives that language and grammar live in the wider world beyond the school's walls.

October 24-28

This week's EotW, " William Shatner experienced profound grief in space. It was the 'overview effect,' " which is about William Shatner's actual trip to space, doesn't look like an essay at first or even second glance. But I think that underneath its journalistic veneer, it is actually very much an essay trying to make a case about coming together during a divided time. At the very least, it is a cool read that looks at space travel from a very different angle.

October 17-21

Just in time for an in-depth discussion of character analysis in my classes this week, " The Ballad of Rubeus Hagrid " celebrates Robbie Coltrane's extraordinary career by looking at how he turned the character of Hagrid into something more than just comic relief that occasionally ventured in from the forest. I also like it is because it is short-about the same length as a 2-3 page essay-and yet it is deep and filled with great video evidence (yeah, multimedia texts!) and insights about a character I have always appreciated.

October 3-7

I like this week's EOTW, " I Make Video Games. I Won't Let My Daughters Play Them," because it takes an important topic-video games-that often lends itself to hyperbole and approaches it what to me feels like a fair and even way. It also comes from the mouth of someone who has been in those rooms for decades, shining light on conversations we don't often get to hear.

September 26-September 30

This week I wanted to share with you a padlet that was first shared with me this summer by Trevor Aleo of Learning That Transfers of video essays. Aleo's collection is excellent and once again shows the range and vibrancy of what an essay can be. Trevor has also already put them into categories and color-coded them for age level, making this an even better resource!

September 19-September 23

We are in the heart of our narrative unit, so my two essays of the week are both narrative/essay hybrids to show that often the best way to attempt to make a point is to share a story. The first is from one of my favorite living writers, Ted Chiang. It is called " The Great Silence," and it is a piece that Chiang wrote for the Arecibo Telescope museum that contrasts the beauty of that work with the loss of species diversity in the forests next to it. The second is " You'll Never Walk Alone" from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, which blends his story with a larger point about the pandemic. As an added bonus, both are also multi-genre, which adds another layer of interest and instruction!

September 12-September 16

I had a very different EotW in mind for today, but then over tea I read " How to Argue Well " by Pamela Paul in the New York Times. It has so much that I love to introduce when I introduce what argumentation should be in the classroom, and says it all so well, that I couldn't help but bump it to the front of the list. I hope you enjoy!

September 6-September 9

I have been thinking a lot about how this fall feels like a tipping point. On the one hand, I worry that if we don't do something about them now, some of the worst parts of school over the last few years could solidify and become even more difficult to dislodge. At the same time, I feel that this year marks an opportunity for a fresh start-a fresh start that, given how much we've learned over the last two years, could actually be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move to something far better than our old normal. Regular readers will know that one of the biggest things that I am striving to reintroduce into my classes right now is joy, which is the topic of this week's EofW " How to Have Fun Again." The essay also is a cool combination of a written essay and sketchnoting, which I'm hoping will also provide a nice quiet nudge for students to rethink what is possible with the essay.

August 29-September 2:

My first Essay of the Week is actually a larger series from NPR called " I'm Really Into " where people write short essays on something they are really into. We will be exploring these this week and writing our own short pieces on what we are really into. Students won't know it is an essay of the week yet (I tend to introduce the concept during week 2), but when I do explain Essay of the Week, I will point back to these to help make the case that essays are all over the place if we are on the lookout for them.

And here are the EotW for 2021-2022:

May 31-June 3:

May 16-May 20:

May 9-May 13:

May 2-May 6:

While researching for an article I'm writing, I stumbled across this treasure trove of letters that Sandra Cisneros wrote to her readers between 2009 to 2021. I'm just beginning to dig into them, but I have already figured out that they are mentor text gold, describing everything from her writing process to what makes for a great party. My classes are beginning an autobiographical multi-genre project this week, and some of these letters will definitely be offered as examples!

April 25-April 29:

This week our focus is on creating a short piece that showcases the most beautiful form of our own writing. To help inspire that I will be sharing the Brian Doyle piece "Joyas Voladoras," which is stuffed with the devices and tools (ranging from appositives to purposeful fragments) we've been exploring. It is also just a really lovely read for a mid-spring morning!

April 18-April 22:

With the start of Ramadan a few weeks ago, I've been looking for a thoughtful essay to mark the occasion, given that I have a fair number of students fasting this year. Last night I finally found it with Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's "On Fasting" from The Paris Review. The essay is an interesting look at the role that fasting during Ramadan plays in Akbar's otherwise largely secular life. True to Akbar's style, it is also a beautiful mix of philosophy, poetry, and science that left me thinking about it for rest of the evening.

April 11-April 15:

The recent beautiful and interactive "ThE SoNgS THaT GeT Us tHrOuGh iT" insert from the New York Times has some of the most vibrant and interesting music reviews I've seen in some time. Further, it has some cool multi-genre elements for those who might be playing around with multiple genres at the end of the year and in need of a mentor text. For those with limited time, check out the Wesley Morris review of Bartees Strange or the Sam Anderson musings about "We Don't Talk about Bruno."

April 4-April 8:

I've been looking for the right article to discuss the war in Ukraine, and Thomas Friedman's piece this week about what he calls World War Wired is just the right mix of backstory, evidence, and interesting argumentation. It is a great example of how the right essay can double-dip and engage in the knowledge-building that sat at the heart of the original article of the week while also showcasing interesting argumentation.

March 21-March 25:

My essay of the week is a short Ta-Nehisi Coates video essay called Dungeons and Dragons in High Culture and Hip Hop as Haiku. We have been talking over the last week about importnat tone and voice is in essay writing, and I think this piece is such a lovely example both. Also it is short and my students love it for whatever reason!

March 14-March 18:

It was 60 degrees on Sunday, which in Michigan means that we had officially crossed over into spring-time territory. With this in mind, my EOTW is "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," which is George Orwell's argument that even (or especially) when the world is falling to pieces around us, we need to take time to savor the beauty of the changing seasons. The essay is a bit long and does veer into some topics that might be a bit much for my students, so I will show them an abridged version, but I have been sharing it for years, and it is a wonderful example of how stuffed with feeling, voice, and meaning an essay can be.

March 7-March 11:

At the semester I changed to a new school, which means that this week I am going to be teaching essays for the first time to a group of reluctant (but hopefully growing less so) freshmen. To help impress upon them the silly joy that can come with essays, I am planning to share with them two essays I found in my Twitter thread about essays from a few weeks back: "Be Cool to the Pizza Dude" and "Stephen King's Guide to Movie Snacks." Both are as far away from what students classically view as essays as they could be, and both make a small point about decency and joy that I hope will strike a chord on a chilly Monday morning.

February 28-March 4:

This weeks EOTW is Thomas Friedman's column from the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine started: "We Have Never Been Here Before." What I like about it is that it has a good blend of background history interwoven with an investigation of a really thoughtful point: We have not seen a conflict this size since the rise smartphones/Google maps/TikTok/etc., and our wired-ness will both impact the war itself and how those outside of the war will experience it. While it is a very good piece, it is also a long piece that drifts by the end, so I'm going to use excerpts, primarily from the first half of it when sharing it with students.

February 21-February 25:

Today's EOTW "Arthur Is Ending, But It's Radical Optimism Will Live On," is a great example of close and thoughtful literary analysis in the real world. This has me thinking about how much fun it might be to someday assign an essay where students write a take about a favorite childhood show/book/movie.

February 14-February 18:

I was feeling low on EOTW inspiration, so I posed the following question to Twitter on Saturday:

And the response was nearly a hundred comments from fellow teachers recommending incredible essay mentor texts. For today's EOTW, I would start by checking out that thread, as it has about two years worth of tried and tested EOTW. My recommendation from it so far (as I haven't had time to go through everything): " Joyas Voladoras " by Brian Doyle absolutely blew me away. I will definitely be sharing that with my students this week!

February 7-February 11:

In my Composition class, we began the new semester with narrative in the way that we always do. In this unit, one potential option the students have is to write a personal essay, which I define as a personal story that strives to make a point. Today, we are going to be picking what kind of story to write, and to help with this, we are looking at a bevy of examples of storytelling, including a few personal essays. A lot of the essays I'm sharing are old standbys that I've already shard here, but one is a forgotten favorite that I just unearthed: A 20 year old one written by Bill Simmons when Tom Brady and the Patriots first won the Super Bowl called "Now I Can Die in Peace." Seeing as it is Super Bowl week and Tom Brady just retired, it felt right, plus I have a lot of sporty students this semester, so this example is a nice nod to them. The original is pretty long, so I plan to share this abridged one.

January 31-February 1:

January 24-28:

January 17-21:

This week's EOTW is more of an idea than one essay, although there is one essay in particular that I will be using. The idea is that when it comes to Martin Luther King Jr., most students know "I Have a Dream" and maybe "Letter from Birmingham Jail" but have not read anything else. And while both of those are fantastic texts ("Letter from Birmingham Jail in particular is one of the finest mentor texts other written), I try to use MLK Day as an opportunity to look at other incredible speeches, essays, and books Dr. King wrote, especially because like all of us, his ideas evolved over his career. With this in mind, in previous years I have shared his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, which allows students to unpack how he changed and didn't change by the late 1960s, and excerpts from his book Strength to Love, in which he talks about a wide range of different topics. This year though I will be sharing his final speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop." Dr. King gave this speech in Memphis the day before he died, and it is famous for its haunting and prophetic ending. What has me wanting to revisit it this year though is a spot in the middle where he argues that the world at that moment was "troubled," "sick," "confused," and "messed up," and that is exactly what he would choose to live in that time over any other in human history. King argues that in hard times there exists an opportunity to grapple with tough questions that societies often don't feel up for addressing in better times-an idea that feels worth reexamining in this troubled moment that we find ourselves in right now.

January 3-7:

December 13-December 17:

This week's EOTW is "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray," a George Orwell essay that became the catalyst for the new book I'm reading and very much enjoying, Orwell's Roses. Reading the book reminded me of what a vibrant and lively essayist Orwell is, so I thought I would bring in the essay, both because it is a really interesting essay about how the plants we plant in our lifetimes can far outlive us and because it allows me to discuss how the book takes one of the "plants" that Orwell left us (in this case his essay) and uses its seeds to grow something new (in this case the book of Rebecca Solnit's thoughts). I'm hoping the students will see the connection between the plant metaphor and the essay writing they are doing, and even if they don't, it is a pretty great essay on a timely theme. Also, I wasn't able to find a good, legal pdf of it (sorry), but "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" is in a lot of essay compilations. Apologies if you can't find it!

December 6-December 10:

Apparently Jane Coaston is speaking to me right now because my EOTW this week is "Can a Michigan Football Game Make Me Happy Forever?" There is a certain irony to this because while I was once a diehard football fan (and for Michigan no less), I almost never watch games it anymore. Even still, given my hometown team and alma mater's recent success (they are going to the National Championship Playoffs), I figure this EOTW will speak to a lot of kids, but what I love about it is that the topic underneath-an investigation into what happiness is and what that means for how we live our life-is really artfully discussed and will hopefully speak to those who both do and don't care for Big Blue or football. Plus, I don't know about you all, but I am in need of a little talking about happiness!

November 29-December 3:

This week's EOTW is "Help! I'm Stuck in a Knowledge Bubble and I Need to Get Out!" by Jane Coaston of the New York Times. What I like best about it is the concept. The first half is a thoughtful and important, but not entirely new, argument about the danger of the bubbles that so many of us live in. Then Coaston does a novel thing though; she spends the second half of the article actually doing the thing that she was arguing for by reaching outside of her bubble to interview college football radio host (and southern icon) Paul Finebaum. The result is an essay that breathes new life into an important topic and one that shows the range of opportunities available for how we use evidence in argumentative writing.

November 15-November 19:

One of my favorite places for EOTW is The Ringer, which regularly has really great essays on topics like sports and pop culture that can get kids talking for hours. Today's piece, Red Notice' Is Yet Another Poor Attempt at a Netflix Movie Franchise, is about the new Netflix movie Red Notice and the limits of using algorithms to write and cast movies. What I like about it for this week though is that it is a great example of evidence-driven analysis to help prove an argument, something we are fully embarking upon with my freshman this week. Plus, my guess is that many, despite the middling reviews, have seen it and have some thoughts!

November 8-November 12:

We are starting a new essay unit this week, so to introduce how one can add emotion to essays, I am going to share some excerpts from one of my favorite modern essay collections, Ross Gay's The Book of Delights. In The Book of Delights, Gay shares a series of daily essays on the concept of delight, and, given his background as a poet, the result is just right for helping to show how one can use emotion to make essays on anything better. I don't have a digital copy of the book I can share, but here is a video of Gay reading a few excerpts, including one I am using today, "Tomato on Board."

November 1-November 5:

We are on Fall Break for the first part of the week, so there is no official EotW this week. If I had to choose an essay to capture the feel of the first part of the week for my students, I might choose the classic essay "On Laziness" by Christopher Morley though :).

October 25-October 29:

This week's EotW is a column called "Nobody Trusts Anybody Now, and We're All Very Tired." In it, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes an essay about one of his favorite horror films, the cult 1982 classic The Thing by John Carpenter. Besides the Halloween tie-in, this essay is such a perfect example of how one can use literary analysis of something from decades earlier to make a bigger and much more important point about the current moment.

October 18-October 22:

This week's essay, Farhad Manjoo's "The Moral Panic Engulfing Instagram," offers a contrasting perspective to last week's essay on TikTok. I like the two essay in concert because they can act as a model for productive and civil debate, and Manjoo's essay is particularly striking in that his central thesis is in many ways "I don't know," which is a novel and powerful conceit for a columnist!

October 11-October 15:

October 4-October 8:

September 27-October 1:

September 20-september 24:

September 13-september 17:

September 7-september 10:

August 30-September 2:

August 22-26:

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Essay of the Week Essay of the Week is built around the idea that for students to write better, deeper, and more lively essays, they need to have regular exposure to the essay form in its many shapes and styles. This is why each week, in the tradition of Kelly Gallahger's Article of the Week,...

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Lots of mentor texts on my website... so many great ones here!

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Lots of mentor texts on my website... so many great ones here!

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Drive Brand Studio - Branding, Advertising, Marketing, Websites

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Penny Kittle is an English teacher, author and advocate dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing.

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Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans (Published 2021)

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For half a century, she has taken the things we know best— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown us how strange they really are.

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I love this collection of short essays so much!

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I love this collection of short essays so much!

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This one on "Stupid" video games generated hundreds of comments

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This one on "Stupid" video games generated hundreds of comments

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Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

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How time-wasting video games escaped the arcade, jumped into our pockets and took over our lives.

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Beverly Cleary Was a Troublemaker Who Wrote Books for Kids Like Herself (Published 2021)

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Why, she wondered, didn’t anyone write stories about real kids — funny, angry, joyful, unruly vortexes of love and chaos?

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I Recommend Eating Chips (Published 2021)

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When our horizons are narrow, junk food — shelf-stable, reliably flavored and yet endlessly unique — offers us a taste of infinity.

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Eventually We All Talk About Bruno (Published 2022)

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The most recent Disney megahit doesn’t work like the usual Disney megahit.

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I am trying to survive this season of fear as I did another one, the summer of 1951, when I contracted polio. But how long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing?

Credit... Lucy Jones

One afternoon in early February, a gazillion memories ago, I put a few things on the curb the day before trash pickup, in accord with my neighborhood's ongoing swap meet. By the next morning the mail carrier had carted off the fireplace irons; someone else took the French coffee press. But my old kitchen wall clock went unclaimed. I propped it against a tree, a forlorn Dali melting into the rough winter earth. Its hands had been stuck at 7:00 for years.

A day later I saw the clock placed high in the branches of the tree, like the Cheshire cat; its hands were reset to 8:20. I took the bait and changed the time again, to 12:00, and so it began: A game of time tag, whimsical and anonymous, that went on for weeks. It was our little version of "Kilroy was Here," a wave of urban camaraderie during a New England winter.

Nobody touches the clock now. People are trying not to touch anything, especially one another, unless it's an emergency, an act of mercy. Time feels broken but so does space, every day a fluid lapse where nothing, or everything, happens. Numbers have become the telltale dispatches from the front: over 1.5 million cases, more than 90,000 dead, too few ventilators and too many hungry people, a million exhausted medical workers.

"I don't have the virus," Gary Shteyngart wrote in The New Yorker last month, about his middle-of-the-night sweats. "I have the fear." I do too. I follow mine like a bell-shaped curve through the day, trying to stay a mindful six feet away from my panic. Breathe, take your temperature, turn off the news, go for a walk, hug the dog. Count the things around you that you love; now, count the things you don't. The day's moods are volatile and unforgiving: Despair, denial, anger, anxiety, heartbreak. We're deluged with tips on how to survive, provided you're blessed and healthy and following the protocols. Turmeric in the tea, online yoga or bridge, Zoom graduations and AA meetings.

The tangible things I miss the most are nearby but might as well be on the moon: the swimming pool, my boat upon the river. The intangible - well, sorrow and emotional chaos can cross any border, no passport needed. I miss, most of all, the absence of fear. And touching people, a spontaneous hand on a cheek or shoulder. I miss good old neurosis, I told a friend, back when most of my problems were of my own doing.

Even on the bad days I know I'm one of the fortunate, protected by the time and space of economics: I have money for groceries and a safe house; I don't have to get on public transportation; I'm over 60 but healthy. I also realize that for vast numbers on this tattered planet, Covid-19 is merely another brick on the load of suffering they face every day.

"The world was already an awful place for billions of people," I blurt out to a friend one night, and his Zoom-blurry nod looks weary, like I've just awakened from a child's dream. Even my sadness feels inadequate, or slightly obscene, an Hermès scarf held up against a tsunami of grief.

I was lucky, too, during another season of fear, the summer of 1951 when I was 6 months old and contracted polio. It was one of the last, worst years of the epidemics that swept through the 20th century, just before the Salk vaccine came into use in 1955. The virus was claiming more victims with each seasonal phase and was still badly misunderstood; it often struck in summer and seemed to target the young, so parents kept their children inside during the vacation months. Movie theaters and water fountains were shut down; nobody went to the beaches. As with Covid-19, the rate of death or permanent affliction was difficult to pinpoint because of subclinical cases; many people caught polio and never knew they had it. A fraction died or suffered permanent paralysis.

Probably because I was so young, I had a relatively mild case: no dreaded iron lung, no utterly maimed childhood or cut-short life. What I had was a weak leg that never worked as well as the other, a limp that slowed me down but didn't fell me. Polio was a shadow in my life, not a divining rod.

I was too small to remember the fear my parents must have known. But I remember the mythic dimensions of what were called "the polio years," when the swimming pools were chained shut and the March of Dimes poster child was everywhere you looked. Most people recovered. The ones who didn't became polio's legacy and reminder, and their numbers gave rise to the field of modern physical therapy as we know it.

Polio changed the world, and so did its cure. When Edward R. Murrow interviewed Jonas Salk, just as the vaccine's success was announced, he asked him, "Who owns the patent to this vaccine?" Salk's answer became a part of history. "Well, the people, I would say," he told Murrow. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

We don't know yet what the scourge of Covid-19 will mean. Not just who and how many will die but also what it will do to those who live. It's a new model nobody can trace or predict: the way courage and loss and failure and endurance can interweave into social mores. Will we go to basketball games again, sing in a choir, let our kids try out for wrestling? What happens to all that precious, infernal time as we wait for a vaccine? How long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing?

When the quarantine began I reread Katherine Anne Porter's wrenching story about the 1918 flu pandemic, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." Even better and fiercer than I remembered, its hallucinatory description of Miranda Gay's illness plays out against a backdrop of ambulance wails and jingoist patriots. What Porter so agonizingly captures is the koan that death takes the sunlight even as it leaves the living. Recovered and grieving her dead lover, Miranda has one of the saddest final lines in American letters: "Now there would be time for everything."

My neighbors and I have driveway parties where we line uplawn chairs for the four of us, 10 feet apart, and laugh about nothing. One night I take over a pot of chicken soup; two days later, a friend of a friend brings me a roaster she found at the store. We start to call it the chicken cycle of life.

I'd been making a maypole, adorned with ribbons, from old bamboo stakes for the front yard, but today it seems like a dumb idea; today, bleakness has beat out perseverance.

Then my adored 10-year-old friend comes crashing down the driveway, stopping the bike halfway to me. I gasp in happiness. "I miss you so much," I cry, and Tyler cries back, "I miss you too!" Together we put our arms up and out, heart surfing, bending toward each other like reeds. We have learned, lickety-split, how to love one another from afar.
Gail Caldwell's fourth memoir, "Bright Precious Thing," will be published in July.

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I am trying to survive this season of fear as I did another one, the summer of 1951, when I contracted polio. But how long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing? One afternoon in early February, a gazillion memories ago, I put a few things on the curb the day before trash pickup, in accord with my neighborhood's ongoing swap meet.

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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"It is not an uplifting aria or a yearning lament. “Bruno” is tense and busy — a crowded, convulsing, percussive, down-in-the-weeds medley sung, in shifts, by society itself. 

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"It is not an uplifting aria or a yearning lament. “Bruno” is tense and busy — a crowded, convulsing, percussive, down-in-the-weeds medley sung, in shifts, by society itself. 

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Eventually We All Talk About Bruno (Published 2022)

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The most recent Disney megahit doesn’t work like the usual Disney megahit.

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I use this digital op-ed piece to illustrate "contrasts/contradictions" signpost in nonfiction.  I got the idea from a FB group and students are riveted. It's not really a comparison essay, but I LOVE this piece!

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San Quentin's Giants | Op-Docs | The New York Times

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I'm not sure exactly which category of essays this fits under (and thinking about that prompted the thought that one sub- genre might be "The Art of ____" essays), but I'm thinking this works as comparison of how something is initially viewed to how it's metamorphosized over time. Lots of wonderful features to dig into with the writing itself here. And it would be intriguing to have students discuss other items or trends that have transformed over time be it beauty practices or other habits.

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How facial muscle paralysis insinuated itself into our emotional and creative lives.

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Simran Jeet Singh is executive director for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society Program and author of "The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life." Singh shares his Brief But Spectacular take on how by focusing on the positive aspects of our multi-religious, racial and ethnic world, society can disrupt bias and build empathy.

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Simran Jeet Singh is executive director for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society Program and author of "The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life." Singh shares his Brief But Spectacular take on how by focusing on the positive aspects of our multi-religious, racial and ethnic world, society can disrupt bias and build empathy.

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Opinion | Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation (Published 2022)

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It’s never been harder to oversee America’s classrooms, and it’s driving educators out en masse.

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Gillette's 'We believe: the best men can be' razors commercial takes on toxic masculinity

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Opinion | After Two Decades in Solitary, This Is His First Day Out

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After nearly 33 years in prison — and over two decades in solitary confinement — Jack Powers embarks on the first day of his new life.

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Michael Jackson - Thriller (Official 4K Video)

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OneRepublic - I Lived (Official Music Video)

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Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

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"Don't Come Around Here No More" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

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"Don't Come Around Here No More" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

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Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - Don't Come Around Here No More (Official Music Video)

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A long-from essay from The New Yorker I will be using this fall in my classroom. Gorgeous writing.

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A long-from essay from The New Yorker I will be using this fall in my classroom. Gorgeous writing.

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Writing Prompts About Food, Family and Culture

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Here are some questions to help students reflect on the food traditions and memories that are most meaningful to them.

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https://www.southernliving.com/culture/celebrities/rick-bragg/rick-bragg-tomato-sandwich

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Rick Bragg Sets The Record Straight On What Makes The Best Tomato Sandwich

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Some people just don’t know what’s good.

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There are the things I always keep on my person: My phone, because duh.

A tote bag, because it's easy to wash when I spill my chai all over it.

My various cards (the important ones, like my credit card, driver's license, school ID, and my frozen yogurt rewards punch card).

And a compact, individual-sized container of Old Bay seasoning.

You might be asking. "Emma, why Old Bay seasoning? Also, your skin is positively glowing today! What's your secret?"

Oh wow, thank you so much! There's no secret - it's just good genes and Shiseido free samples my grandmother sends me.

But in regards to the Old Bay, my reasoning mostly hinges on functionality. I eat nearly every meal in a college dining hall whose food can be best described as "demoralizing." A sprinkle of Old Bay can elevate anything from a dry chicken breast to a nondescript "featured fish" to even (if the pickings are especially bad) a hard-boiled egg.

And of course, the transformative power of Old Bay isn't limited to just the confines of college cuisine. Bland food runs wild like a plague amongst this earth! Carrying a shaker of Old Bay, I am Achilles armed with his mighty shield, running into an epic battle against unseasoned food. And even beyond its culinary uses, a container of Old Bay is a conversation piece! "Oh hey, what's that in your bag?" "Oh, just a shaker of Old Bay seasoning." "Wow, that's so cool! Will you be my friend? Also here's all the money in my wallet."

Old Bay transforms a tasteless foodstuff into a mediocre meal. You could say that it's my "spoonful of sugar." But instead of that magical syrup Julie Andrews doles out in Mary Poppins, it's orange, grainy and really high in sodium.

But aside from the functionality, I guess I keep Old Bay with me because it reminds me of home.

I remember eating a bucket of fries smothered in Old Bay while digging a giant hole into the middle of Bethany Beach, not far from where the spice blend was created. I remember the scent of seafood when my family hosted blue crab boils - the searing pain when the Old Bay coating the shells got into the cuts of my skin.

It's nice to have a bit of our pantry at the bottom of my bag. It's nice to carry something with me that reminds me of what I've left behind.

At 22, my childhood feels both like something still close enough to touch, and something that's sailed impossibly far away. When I think of home, I think of hardwood floors, the sound of boiling jjigae, of sunlight falling through a picture window. I think of our pantry stacked high with snacks, packets of dried seaweed, and its tall rack of spices. It's nice to have a bit of our pantry at the bottom of my bag. It's nice to carry something with me that reminds me of what I've left behind.

Emma Eun-joo Choi is the host of NPR's Everyone & Their Mom, a new show from Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

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Old Bay in my bag: How I make anything taste like home

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There are the things I always keep on my person: My phone, because duh. A tote bag, because it's easy to wash when I spill my chai all over it. My various cards (the important ones, like my credit card, driver's license, school ID, and my frozen yogurt rewards punch card).

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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I chose this text because my students will write about food, Kwame Alexander is one of our favorite authors, and reflection is a comfortable place for many writers to begin.

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving.

This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

The last meal I shared with my mother was in a capacious hospital room in Chesapeake, Virginia. It was breakfast time and the sun was a carefree soul galloping through the window like a wild horse. Having not eaten much in the 48 hours since she'd been admitted with complications of sarcoidosis, she was quite hungry. So I fed her. Spooned the applesauce. Placed in her mouth a few ice chips from the water glass she couldn't finish (crunching ice always gratified her). That was 2017. The year my heart broke into a million jagged puzzle pieces.

None of us is ever prepared for death. When a great tree falls, the birds, with no branch to perch on, scatter. Looking for a new home. In the four years since my graceful mother has passed, I've been searching. Thumbing through old scrapbooks, sprinkling her ashes in places we lived and traveled- Brooklyn and St. Croix and Fayetteville, North Carolina-all in an effort to find some solace. To find a new home.

In 2018, when the American School in London invited me to become its inaugural Innovator-in-Residence, I welcomed the opportunity for that solace, along with a professional reboot. I'd gotten into a writing rhythm that, while successful, felt almost too comfortable. The process of coming up with a beginning, middle, and end was akin to riding a bike for me, and I could cruise through a story, arms akimbo, head to the wind. I needed to challenge my storytelling normal, become inspired in new and exciting ways, learn to pop a wheelie.

Part of moving yourself forward in a life-giving way is to take the things from the past that have helped shape and mold you and use them as anchors to the future. My own vision of what lay ahead came during two farewell dinners hosted by friends in the summer of 2019. First, award-winning children's book illustrator Melissa Sweet crafted homemade lobster rolls the size of my arms in her palsy-walsy Maine home. Then I drove south to dine alfresco-grilled snapper, cheddar biscuits, Summer in a Bottle rosé-in celebration of Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel at her family's country estate. These two women not only burned in the kitchen, but laughed and told stories and answered phone calls and helped with homework and listened. At the same time. With the cool and calm of a river flowing in a forest. Just like my mother used to do. Determined to do the same, the new Kwame would find his way home not only by moving to London but by cooking.

In my first few weeks there, I figured out how to catch a bus to Maida Vale, write at an outdoor café while sipping English breakfast tea, and take refuge at the bottom of the London Library when it rained. I also learned to make some pretty tasty pasta-fettuccine Alfredo, spinach lasagna-that my finicky 11-year-old daughter, Samayah, actually enjoyed.

As the weeks turned to months, I discovered the best walking route to Samayah's new school. I learned how to listen and acknowledge her cries for independence and smile when she grabbed my hand and held it, our fingers braided like the cornrows her mother designed. I learned how to answer her not-so-random questions about why can't we get a car or do you have to walk me the whole way or can we have a break from pasta... and make Granny's fried chicken for dinner?

"If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you," wrote Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Thus, I imagined, if you read good cookbooks, good food would come out of your kitchen. So I immersed myself in a plethora of cooking primers, instructional videos, and blogs. I cooked daily while listening to music, helping Samayah with homework, and just being in the moment. My recipe file fattened. Some meals turned out delicious the first time: Fish chowder. Ghanaian red red. Lobster mac and cheese (which almost didn't happen 'cause lobster meat in London is more expensive than beluga caviar). Others required experimentation: Tuscan bread salad. Blueberry scones. Beer-battered fish. Unfortunately, my buttermilk pancakes looked, and tasted, more like crepes. Fortunately, my daughter loves crepes. But she also loves chicken, and she kept asking me to make it.

During my adolescent summers, my mother often took us to Virginia Beach where we'd spend the day building sandcastles, swimming too far out, and screaming bloody murder when we got bit by a jellyfish. Two things loom large in those memories. One was this: As hungry as we were from playing in the water, we hated getting out of it for lunch because of my mother's belief that one must wait 30 minutes to swim after eating (or face severe cramps due to lack of blood flow to the stomach and thus drown). The other: Once you bit into one of my mother's crispy, juicy fried chicken drumsticks, the complaining stopped. She charmed us.

Until she was five, Samayah was a vegetarian-until we sent her to my mother's for her own summer weekend. As the story goes, Granny packed the three visiting grandchildren into her burgundy Hyundai one Saturday morning and carted them off to Virginia Beach for a day of swimming and sandcastles. Around midday she summoned each of them from the water and handed out brown paper bags full of chicken. When Samayah came home I understood the resoluteness in her smile. "Daddy, I'm not a vegetarian anymore."

Fried chicken was one of my mother's signature dishes, as it was my grandmother's, and her grandmother's before that. Now that I wanted to continue the tradition for my daughter in my modest London kitchen, I needed the recipe. So I called around to my sisters, my aunts, even my father (who only ever lovingly made two dishes, mustard mac and cheese and tad-too-bland baked chicken). But I got the same answer from each of them: There is no recipe. They simply used a little bit of this and a little bit of that and cooked it until it was done. These reveals were often followed by joyous remembrances of picnics and Sunday dinners and family reunions, and every now and then I'd get a clue: Barbara had that cast-iron skillet. Your grandmother used Crisco. The paper bag? They say it's to better coat the chicken, but we only used it 'cause Momma used it. Garlic powder. Paprika. And don't forget the oil has gotta be hot!

This is how I began putting the pieces of my puzzle back together again. I'd go to the butcher down the block and buy six wings and two breasts one day, four thighs and five legs another. Try to remember my mother in the kitchen-her fingers covered in flour, her jubilant singing filling the room, her seasoned spirit. Imagine and reimagine the ingredients in her brown paper bag. See her placing the chicken in her pan, allowing each piece room to breathe. And every time I cooked, I felt a little bit closer to her, perched on a branch of her life.

Frying chicken right can feel like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive. But there is a form to guide you, and with practice you can find the flow. For me it took a dozen tries, and yet the ecstatic look on my kid's face when she bit into that twelfth and final chicken wing was worth the wait. She got what she'd asked for. So did I. Through cooking I'd reunited with my mother, forged a powerful kinship. It was life-giving.

This one beautiful life is a series of puzzles. If you're fortunate you get someone to show you how they fit together. If you're really lucky, when they're gone, you learn how to let their memory guide you, hug you, gather you. So that when you get sad and unsure-because this new puzzle seems undoable-at least you have the precious memories to feed you while you put the pieces back together and find your way home.

Get the Recipe:

Kwame Alexander is the poet-in-residence at NPR's 'Morning Edition' and cocreator of a Disney+ series based on his Newbery Medal-winning novel, 'The Crossover.'

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past-and My Daughter's Future

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving. This is All on the Table , a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

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Yes, a cookbook memoir that is a delight to read.

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Yes, a cookbook memoir that is a delight to read.

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Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day: A Cookbook

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Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day: A Cookbook [Scott, Rodney, Elie, Lolis Eric] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day: A Cookbook

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This comic, illustrated by Chelsea Saunders, is inspired by an interview with chef Sean Sherman from About Sean Sherman TED Radio Hour's episode The Food Connection. This segment of TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Twitter @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadio@npr.org.
Chef Sean Sherman is the founder of " The Sioux Chef," a company committed to revitalizing and reclaiming Native American cuisine. He is a member of the Ogalala Lakota Sioux tribe. His main culinary focus has been on bringing indigenous food systems like land stewardship and wild food usage to a modern culinary context.

His restaurant Owamni in Minneapolis, MN features dishes that prioritize Indigenous-sourced foods native to his region, and leaves out colonial ingredients like beef and chicken to create a "decolonized dining experience." In 2017, he co-authored the cookbook The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen.

Through his nonprofit NATIFS, he also co-founded the Indigenous Food Lab, a professional Indigenous kitchen and training center dedicated to preserving Indigenous food education.

He was the recipient of a 2015 First Peoples Fund Fellowship, the 2018 Bush Foundation Fellowship, the National Center's 2018 First American Entrepreneurship Award, the 2018 James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook and a 2019 James Beard Leadership Award.

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COMIC: One Sioux chef's attempt to reclaim Native American cuisine

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This comic, illustrated by Chelsea Saunders, is inspired by an interview with chef Sean Sherman from About Sean Sherman TED Radio Hour's episode The Food Connection . This segment of TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Twitter @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadio@npr.org .

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Letter of Recommendation: Spam (Published 2019)

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A Filipino staple passed down through the generations since World War II.

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I Recommend Eating Chips (Published 2021)

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When our horizons are narrow, junk food — shelf-stable, reliably flavored and yet endlessly unique — offers us a taste of infinity.

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Cheetos Flamin’ Hots Made Me Who I Am (Published 2022)

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In middle school, I envied the wealthy white kids. But I had something they didn’t have, too.

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Junk Food Was Our Love Language (Published 2020)

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To feel close to my father, a man I never fully knew, I eat chicken nuggets.

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring | Elizabeth Acevedo

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring | Elizabeth Acevedo

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This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

It was my job to trim the ruffled edges off the boiled lasagna sheets. My mother-a cook so particular she once remade the chicken at a friend's dinner party because it looked "too pale"-does not abide by anything but straight-edged pasta. "It's the only way to get an even texture," she'd say, and that was important when it came to lasagna de carne, the centerpiece of our family's annual New Year's Eve feast.

From a young age I considered cooking to be Mami's domain and hers alone. Oh, I'd chop beets for the ensalada rusa and grate carrots for the macaroni salad, but I was just following orders until she turned her back and I could return to my novels and video games.

Every New Year's Eve my father would buy almonds and chestnuts, a well-worn nutcracker at the ready. There would be ice-cold beers and Manischewitz, his preferred holiday wine. With Mami's alchemy filling the air-garlicky tomatoes smothered in bubbly cheese-we'd begin getting ready. Hair in rollers, button-down shirts, a family of pomp and circumstance even if the only place we'd party was our tiny two-bedroom in Morningside Heights. We greeted the new year as a unit: eyes on the TV, incense in the air, stomachs full.

Then came New Year's Eve 2009. The year we unbecame who we'd been.

Back home in New York for winter break, I was with a few sorority sisters when my eldest sibling called: My brother Rob was in the hospital. He'd had another episode.

For over a year we'd all watched as Rob struggled. He'd become silent. Fascinated with dark rooms. Full of angry, baseless accusations. He was never violent, but harm comes in many forms. Doctors from New York-Presbyterian told us that they believed it was paranoid schizophrenia.

We are a Dominican-ass family, quite superstitious. Pennies on our foreheads to stop nosebleeds. Sacraments to guarantee entry to heaven. My mother still strongly believes dreams tell us when someone's going to die. But we had no experience dealing with mental health.

My parents called 911 on December 30. I joined them at the hospital, then went home while they handled the paperwork. The kitchen was in disarray; Mami had been preparing beef for the lasagna when things got hectic. She'd managed to get it into the fridge, but that was all.

I don't know why I did it. We did not have much to celebrate. There were no chestnuts, no music. Perhaps I thought the only thing holding us loosely together was the idea of a better day, a better decade, better care that might result in better health for a beloved. Perhaps I just wanted to scramble toward normal, grasp onto a bit of comfort and routine. So I tried to remember the basic steps: the boiling, the removal of crinkles, the vamping up of jarred tomato sauce. The layers and layers. Alone, I stacked my grief. I cooked through tears. By the time my mother returned from the hospital, I was elbow deep in ground beef.

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring

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This is All on the Table , a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community. It was my job to trim the ruffled edges off the boiled lasagna sheets. My mother-a cook so particular she once remade the chicken at a friend's dinner party because it looked "too pale"-does not abide by anything but straight-edged pasta.

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Personal essay: How Ramen got me Through Adolescence 

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Personal essay: How Ramen got me Through Adolescence 

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How Ramen Got Me Through Adolescence (Published 2014)

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I had two sources of warmth during the cold middle-school years: a cocoon of books and a bowl of shelf-stable noodles.

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40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever

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An oral history of Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” spot, which helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV’s biggest commercial showcase.

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Opinion | Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere

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A popular academic theory merits closer scrutiny.

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How Maurice Sendak Lived With His Own Wild Things

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For decades, the author of “In the Night Kitchen” and “The Nutshell Library” fortified himself with art and words.

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Taylor Swift fans...you'll find this fascinating.

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Taylor Swift fans...you'll find this fascinating.

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Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice

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Opinion | Amanda Gorman: In Memory of Those Still in the Water

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By writing an elegy through the words of history, I hope to unearth, or unwater, the dead from beneath a mass of waves.

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Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?

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Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield.

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The dilemma After Covid lockdowns, our primary He was slowly improving until February this year when his favourite teacher retired. He could trust her and she could control the class. After she left, he could not cope. Hysteria followed, real emotional grief. This led to emotionally based school avoidance occurring again. Home schooling is not an option. We feel so isolated with this. school-age son decided retirement is what he needs, not being at school. Initially, he returned to school happy and excited. The school ramped up the learning, saying the children were behind, and he struggled with that. There was disruption in class, which he wasn't used to, and he lost his joy of school. He refused to go in. We had three months of cajoling him to go, persuading, begging. We tried the tough approach: "Drag him in!" That backfired. We tried the parental support approach, either his dad or I sitting in the school library. That worked, but we also have jobs to go to. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services haven't helped us much and we got a letter from the county council threatening a fine and legal action.
Philippa's answer This is not going to be a quick fix and you are not alone. Not Fine in School is a support group for families with children who find it hard or impossible to attend school. It launched in 2018 with 100 members. Post lockdown, they now have more than 30,000.

Persistent absenteeism is up 117% since the lockdowns, equating to 22.3% of all pupils in primary, secondary and special state schools. That's 1,615,772 pupils. And what seems to be happening in the UK educational system is that the individual pupil is seen as the whole problem rather than acknowledging that the school environment and unhelpful government policies around targets are a part of this, too. Parents are also blamed. And, in our educational system, there is too much of an attitude that draconian, punishing measures, such as fines for parents, are the way to go. This isn't the only way to go. One size does not fit all. Many of our schools are not fit environments for our children - they are too noisy, scary and overwhelming, while resources are too stretched to do much about it.

It sounds as if your son has had too much pressure put on him to "catch up", plus he doesn't feel safe in school. Maybe this happens when he sees a teacher lose control of the classroom. He has been put back into this situation without a gentle re-entry, without being given the time to adjust and find out how he can belong and feel secure in this situation. The children are further stressed by being told they are behind and must put in extra effort to catch up.

Professor Lucy Easthope, an expert disaster responder, told me: "My heart breaks at how wrong we may be getting this. After disasters around the world, many communities take time for children to heal. They suspend the curriculum and spend some weeks outside. The UK has taken a different approach after the pandemic and hammered catch-up and a pretence that nothing has happened. The wisest, most empathic children are simply not buying that."

Many who previously had not suffered from shyness are finding being among people again is draining

Many who previously had not suffered unduly from shyness are finding that being among people again after isolation is draining. It is as though being sociable is like a muscle that needs regular exercise. Our social muscles atrophied during the lockdowns, plus we were made to feel that we could either kill or be killed if we got too close to other people. Such a message may get deeply absorbed by children.

They needed time to rebuild their social muscle by re-establishing friendship groups and getting to know teachers again. Your son made progress when there was a teacher who made him feel safe, but that safety net went before his confidence had fully returned. And, as you have found out, no one can be scolded into being less sensitive or more confident.
If you have a question, send an email to askphilippa@observer.co.uk
Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions
Join with other parents to campaign for more flexibility in schools, more pastoral help, and a move away from the one-size-fits-all approach. And for your son, think in terms of very small steps and expect to accommodate some backwards steps at times, too.

You need to put some pressure on the school for them to recognise his need for an adult there who can relate to him well. Without a trusted safe relationship in school your son will find it difficult to reintegrate. You could also try some short one-on-one play dates to build up his tolerance of being around others.

Take your son's emotions seriously so he feels listened to and understood, but also show him you are not overwhelmed by his feelings by keeping calm. This will gradually teach him that he can, in time, contain them, too.

Recommended reading: The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Sensitive People Struggle and How All Can Survive by W Thomas Boyce, and Square Pegs, Inclusivity, Compassion and Fitting In, edited by Ian Gilbert. There are many helpful case studies in the book, and it points out, "The trouble with square pegs is that by forcing them to fit the system's round holes, you end up damaging the peg, not the hole."

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Our son is refusing to go to school - and we feel so isolated

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The effect of Covid on our children has been huge. Your son needs to feel safe and be given time to catch up

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ne February night in a London hospital, my perception of time shrunk to the span of a moment. Around 24 hours after my wife went into labour, we were rushed into emergency surgery. Our baby had acquired an infection. As I held my wife's hand in the sterile silence of the operating theatre, it felt like nothing else in the world existed. Our recent past of slow, stable expectation faded away and the future became impossible to see with any fidelity - all that was left was now.

We were lucky; the threat receded, and after five nights of recovery and antibiotics, we stepped out of the timeless maternity ward and back into the world, carrying our daughter, Grace. Gradually, our future as a new family settled into view.

I am fortunate to have encountered such emergencies only rarely in my life - encounters with shock, fear or sudden loss - but for each, I can recall how time fell out of joint. Crisis tends to trap you in the present.

Over the past few years, I've been researching and writing a book called The Long View, about why our sense of time is malleable - how it can be foreshortened without us realising and how to lengthen our perspectives. Unlike the vast majority of other animals, we have a remarkable ability to manipulate time in our minds. Scientists call it "mental time travel": as you read these words, you can transport your perspective into the past and stitch together those memories into a tapestry of possible futures.

However, that does not mean our timeviews cannot be coloured, swayed or even diminished. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses: shortsighted targets, salient distractions and near-term temptations. When these combine with the psychological habits we inherited from our ancestors, a longer perspective can recede from view.

Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses

One temporal stress that we now face daily is the sense that we live in a period of concatenating crises: financial crisis, pandemic crisis, climate crisis, Ukraine crisis, cost-of-living crisis - each one blending into another. People talk of a polycrisis, a cluster of related global risks and their effects, and of a permacrisis, the Collins Dictionary's 2022 word of the year, defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity".

Is it true? Certainly it is for people personally affected by conflict, poverty or loss. But for those who live in relative comfort - myself included - it's less clear. I know that, for my part, the media I consume influences how I feel about myself and the world, whereas when my great-grandparents faced upheaval, they did not have to live in a 21st-century news environment with 24-hour feeds and daily doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling is not good for mental wellbeing and health. In one study, people asked to watch negative news bulletins were more likely to feel anxious and sad afterwards, and to catastrophise a personal worry that had nothing to do with the content. But more subtly, a daily diet of bad news could be influencing our timeviews. Immersing oneself in negative news risks the onset of doomism, a form of apathy where the future stops being plural - shrinking to a singular path or even seeming to end altogether - without us realising. A diet of continual outrage and shock can create skewed mental models of the past, present and future. People's judgments become based on what's most readily available and prominent in memory - a psychological effect called the "availability heuristic". The mind tends to paint possible futures using experiences that are most accessible.

We're also affected by whatever the loudest, most urgent distractions of the moment are, distractions in the present that come to dominate decisions. When people look ahead, the quieter information - slower changes that don't get picked up by the news - tend to be ignored. It's like what happens when you see a car crash, as the influential psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman once put it. "It is a common experience that the subjective probability of traffic accidents rises temporarily when one sees a car overturned by the side of the road." The irony is that people tend to underestimate their risk of a vehicle crash, and overestimate their risk of, say, terrorism, when it appears on the news. After 9/11, many people shunned flying to travel by car instead, which researchers estimate caused 1,200 additional deaths in the US.

A daily diet of bad news will influence our sense of time

As we navigate the time-shortening pressures of the modern world, it's worth noting that our minds did not evolve to take a long view. Our mental time machine we inherited from our ancestors changed the course of human evolution, but it came with flaws. One example is the way the mind tends to equate time with space. This is reflected in culture. Consider the pairing in the opening line of Star Wars: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

This tendency to entwine physical dimensions with temporal distance - called construal level theory - means that, in practice, people tend to place greater emotional weight on events that are visible, clearly in view, while feeling relatively indifferent to events "far" from now. The upshot is that events presented within the daily or hourly cadence of news gain disproportionate attention. Take the climate. Because many of its impacts won't be seen for years and decades, it's hard for some to register that the world is heating up until something serious happens, like weird weather, a flood or wildfire.

So, how might we cultivate a healthier timeview? We can't step out of the present altogether as doing so runs the risk of becoming detached from the injustices and suffering of today. However, it is possible to seek out the long news - of the decade or century, not just yesterday, today and tomorrow. Personally, I have tried to increase the time I spend reading books or longer-form journalism, for example, and cutting back on Twitter (I fail often, but at least I'm failing consciously).

There's also a growing body of psychological research showing techniques for achieving a longer view. One of the most promising is perspective-taking, where people are asked to step into the shoes of past or future generations to imagine their point of view. Researchers have found this is more effective than showing people data or abstract information, encouraging cross-generational empathy that can reduce psychological distance on issues such as future climate change.

For me, this begins with my daughter, Grace, imagining her path to the next century. She will be 86 years old in 2100. I find it remarkable to consider that there are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us - and when I do so, my sense of time and possibility opens up a little more.

There are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us

Discovering a longer view is not easy. When I look back at my own attempts over the past decade, I can see just how much my time perspective has fluctuated - and evolved. Indeed, halfway through drafting this article, I lost my sense of time entirely. In April, I was hospitalised in a mountain bike crash that left me with temporary amnesia, and no firm footing on my path from yesterday to tomorrow. My wife tells me I'd "wake up" every so often, shocked to learn about the accident, before responding with the same four words: "So, fill me in..." I was trapped in a loop, stuck in my own personal "now".

Looking back today, with my mental time machine restored, I am reminded how lucky I am to experience time in the way I do. The ability to project my mind across the long-term past and future certainly has its downsides - it allows me to worry, to fear what's to come, and even to contemplate my own mortality - but it is also a gift. It allows me to see how far our imperfect species has come, and the clarity to see the possible paths ahead - a plural future, rather than a singular one.

What I have learned is that the long view is about much more than escaping the traps of the present. Sometimes, it is a perspective that allows one to transcend the stresses of the moment. Other times, it offers guidance in periods of uncertainty. Often, it provides principles for understanding the world. But most of all, it is a way of seeing what matters most within the here and now. The long view, I believe, can make the present more meaningful. So, while it may well be true that we live in a period of crises, if we are to navigate our way through 2023 and beyond, it begins by changing the way we see time.

The Long View: Why We Need To Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher is published by Wildfire at £16.99. To buy it for £14.95, go to guardianbookshop.com

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Time-warped: how modern life shortens our perspectives

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Many of us feel the anxiety of living in a time of 'polycrisis', but taking a long view will help you cope

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Read this with "My Child is In an Impossible Place..." to see the hope of science in the fight against cancer.

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Read this with "My Child is In an Impossible Place..." to see the hope of science in the fight against cancer.

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Opinion | Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?

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New treatments are changing once deadly forms of the disease into manageable long-term illnesses. But not all patients are benefiting.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Credit... Linda Huang

There appears to be a common sentiment in America that things have become too politically correct, that people have grown far too sensitive. I hear this complaint most often in conjunction with the proliferation of language - new pronouns, new labels - surrounding gender. What those who complain about an epidemic of political correctness don't understand is that for some of us, that language can be a lifeline.

Before I gained enough language, I believed that I was transgender. I'd never felt like a boy. I had friends who had begun transitioning and this was the language that they used, and so I followed. From the ages of 15 to 21 I dressed with a femme presentation. I wore wigs, a weave and makeup, and believed that after high school I would begin officially transitioning. I didn't feel at home in my body or this language - but it was all I had.

I attended high school in West Baltimore, in an incredibly depleted and violent neighborhood, in a criminally underfunded school. I was ostracized constantly, but I managed to build a small group of friends who served as a wall around me. This wall made me feel beautiful, it made me feel loved - but it couldn't teach me the words I needed to properly identify myself. The world I grew up in gave me no examples of fluctuation or variation.

My brief experience thinking of myself as transgender was jarring and confusing. I'd flinch if a girl referred to me as she or her; women often weaponized these pronouns against me when they viewed me as a threat or wanted to make fun of me. But I'd also cringe when boys referred to me as he or him, because those words felt too sharp, as if they were being used to remind me of my place; and when they came from boys I desired, I felt completely undesirable. I didn't assert my truth in language, because I didn't know how.

The older that I got, the less I felt represented in the transgender narrative. It simply did not fit. Some days I felt comfortable being a gay boy. Some days I felt at home as a beautiful girl. There were also times where I felt like neither, or both. When I got to college I started to experiment with androgyny. I cropped my long, bouncy, black weave into a blond and crimson Mohawk. I started to wear my clothes a bit looser so that people couldn't identify my gender.

If I'd had access to the right language, it's possible that I might have felt empowered by this change. Instead, people on campus began referring to me as "it" or "he-she." Eventually I folded into myself. I cut my hair off, wore drastically less makeup and took to wearing all black clothing, because I was constantly mourning the identities I might have had, that the world had slowly killed. I became increasingly depressed and even attempted to end my life.

In the years since, inclusion in language has blossomed. Now we not only have glorious and complex examples of what it means to be transgender, we also have words for people like me who simply don't feel at home as male or female, or being referred to as he or she. Now we have words like gender neutral, gender deviant, gender nonconforming and non-binary making and taking up space. Now we have pronouns like "they/them" and "zi/zer," among many others.

Sadly, it feels as though I missed the bus. I am completely at home now with my male identification. I don't know whether this was a natural progression or if I was beaten into submission by the world. However I got here, I feel comfortable with my "he" and "him," but I know that I lost a lot in my retreat. At times I still fear that I'm not being my most authentic self.

Language is meant to be inclusive, but most important, it is meant to expand, to be updated and challenged by the times. However, language can also repress: It's not a coincidence that the people who are most often allowed to deem the world too sensitive and politically correct are the ones who wield power and privilege over others. For black people, this means white people; for gay people, this means straight people; and for trans and gender-nonconforming persons, this means the world.

As a society, it seems sometimes that we have no desire to grow. Any hint at change is met with aggression. I wish so desperately that I could have had these words as a child, that I could have claimed my own gender neutrality, my own gender deviance. I wish that language was more accessible to people who need it most. People of color, people living in poverty in places like West Baltimore, people who are being suffocated by an inability to claim who they are.

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Opinion | P.C. Language Saved My Life (Published 2018)

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Op-Ed Contributor There appears to be a common sentiment in America that things have become too politically correct, that people have grown far too sensitive. I hear this complaint most often in conjunction with the proliferation of language - new pronouns, new labels - surrounding gender.

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(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

Tom Bissell is an author and screenwriter. His books include "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" and "Creative Types: And Other Stories."
The Challenger space shuttle disaster and "The Legend of Zelda" are endlessly entangled in my mind. I'd always remembered - and began writing this essay believing - that, on Jan. 28, 1986, I was home sick from school and playing Zelda at the moment the shuttle exploded. The dates, alas, don't line up: The gamewasn't released to the North American market until 1987. Still, I think I know why my memory insists on this odd pairing. For people born in the early-to-mid-1970s, the Challenger disaster was our first collective glimpse of national decline - a dismal augury of the generational voyage to come. But Zelda was all brightness and ascendancy, suggesting that video games weren't the brain-rotting toys of our parents' worst assumptions but rather something new on this earth.

Before Zelda, kids like me played video games because we were bored to death in our small towns and suburban enclaves, craving the dopamine pellets games reliably dispensed. AfterZelda, kids like me played video games because they were engines of powerful surrogate experiences.

What we didn't know was that Zelda would be growing up right alongside us. The franchise's most recent iteration, "Tears of the Kingdom," was released last Friday. It's a game that my daughter, for one, "waited two whole years for!" In fairness to her, two years constitutes roughly one-fourth of her earthly existence, which is a long time to wait. And so we started playing it the moment she got home from school.

Guest Opinion: Want to succeed in college? Spend more time playing video games with friends.

The original "Legend of Zelda" - a game rampant with secrets, hidden passages and lost treasure - felt like a heightened version of childhood, akin to when I crashed around in the woods behind my grade school in the dim hope of finding something unusual. In real life, I rarely found anything, but in Zelda I always found something. A Zelda game is a curiosity-rewarding machine, wherein every weapon or item you find is a potential key, and you can't walk by a rock or a bush without being nagged by the feeling that it's hiding something special.

Despite that, over the years, I've missed more Zelda titles than I've played. But being able to walk away from Zelda and painlessly return to her later is a big part of the franchise's appeal, at least to me. The Zelda games aren't overstuffed with inane, distracting lore. They boast a few marquee characters - Princess Zelda, the intrepid player character Link, the big-bad Ganon - but the rest of it, from their graphical stylings to how they actually play, shifts and slides from Zelda to Zelda, sometimes with tectonic severity.

" The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," released in 2017, embraced this path of divergence. It's often considered the greatest video game ever made. Needless to say, it's highly atypical when a series of any kind steps up to the plate for its 19th main installment and blasts the ball clear into the parking lot. I say that having barely played "Breath of the Wild." Instead, I watched my daughter play it, day after day, for weeks, during the opening innings of the pandemic. This was a Zelda game all right - mysterious and endlessly traversable - but it resembled the original Zelda the way a stromatolite resembles a sperm whale.

I've worked on and off in video game development for more than a decade, which is to say I don't think video games are bad for kids. On the contrary, I think the best games are plainly good for kids. Immoderate video game playing, like immoderate anything, should obviously be discouraged, but we never had that problem with our daughter. She'd always liked video games, but they rarely occupied her mind for long. "Breath of the Wild" changed that. Although the story it tells is roughly analogous to that of a Saturday morning cartoon, its gameplay and superb "puzzle shrines" - basically, escape rooms that must be solved via Link's time- and space-bending powers - often made "Breath of the Wild" feel like the unholy spawn of M.C. Escher and B.F. Skinner.

As my daughter experimented with Link's abilities to stop time for an object, to manipulate metallic objects with magnetism and to alter objects' midflight trajectories, I could almost sense the new neural pathways burning their way along her eager little brain. When I look back on developmental milestones, my daughter's first word, first step, first joke and first day of school are up there with her turning to me, grinning, after having finally figured out how to bypass the fiendish Hila Rao shrine in "Breath of the Wild." This should explain her anticipation for "Tears of the Kingdom," a direct sequel to "Breath of the Wild" - only the second direct sequel in the 37-year history of the franchise.

I played Zelda as an impish detective, investigating the humblest corners of the game world, bombing every rock and burning down every bush in the hopes of finding a secret door. What my daughter most loved about "Breath of the Wild," conversely,was futzing around with its elaborate systems. The cooking system, say, which allowed her to mix and match more than 100 ingredients, which sometimes resulted in a health-restoring omelet and other times in a pile of purple mush the game decorously referred to as "dubious food." She also enjoyed stacking the effects of Link's magical abilities - time-stopping a falling crate, say, then whacking it with her sword to redirect its trajectory, climbing atop and enjoying the ride once the time-stoppage effect wore off.

Link has a whole new array of thaumaturgical abilities in "Tears of the Kingdom," including one that, almost immediately, I sensed was going to be a problem. This ability, called Ultrahand (which sounds like a 1970s prog-rock arena band), allows Link to glue together wood, rock, wheels, tires, planks, engines and other stray items you find around the world. In practice, this allows the player to construct crude Lincoln Log-style boats, motorcycles, wagons, structures or, really, anything you can imagine.

Review: 'Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' makes you feel like a creative genius

Once the Ultrahand ability was unveiled, I watched my daughter spend an hour constructing a series of log rafts that were far too large and elaborate to float. Whenever I nudged her toward some enticing cave entrance or, you know, finding the lost Princess Zelda, she shushed me. Finally, she got one of her oversize log rafts to rest easy upon the water, shortly after which she figured out how to imbue it with mechanical rather than wind power. She spent the next couple hours elaborating upon this new development, which mostly involved her launching one unmanned raft after another across a lake.

When we found the abandoned mine carts, the question for my daughter became how many she could glue together and still get them moving along the rusted tracks. Between all the Ultrahand R&D, my daughter was also chopping down trees and fusing together the resultant logs to make lean-to structures, just in case she came back to an area later and it was raining and she wanted to "cook something." (God help us all, you can cook in "Tears of the Kingdom," too.) At one point, sensing my impatience, my daughter invoked the Wright brothers as her mathematical proof for the necessity of experimentation. What about all the monsters, I asked, the beasts and creatures she was duty-bound as Link to strike down with sword and bow?"Meh," she said, shrugging. "Pass."

"Pass?" I wanted to say to her. " Pass? " Fighting monsters is the whole point of the game! Which isn't even true, strictly speaking. "Tears of the Kingdom," like every Zelda game before it, is about wandering, thinking, tinkering. I adored the original "Legend of Zelda" because it made the rural Midwestern world I grew up in feel enigmatic, even mildly dangerous. My daughter is growing up in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills, otherwise known as the Land Without Yards and Sidewalks. She can't walk outside our front door to play without putting herself immediately in the path of some Porsche Cayenne doing 40 in a 15. Games such as "Breath of the Wild" and "Tears of the Kingdom" might be the closest approximation she has for the sort of unstructured play I took for granted as a kid. I'm not here to lionize the era I grew up in, much less the region, but there's something to be said for an impossibly elaborate sandbox world that's filled with peril and secrets but also doubles as a place for a kid like my daughter to be a goal-less weirdo and goof.

Review: The new Zelda game is like nothing we've ever seen before

You lose that ability as an adult. Even when we're in situations overtly shaped by play, we see them merely as opportunities to exploit, expand and conquer. But the purest forms of play are not supposed to incline us to exploit. They're supposed to incline us to poke and prod and explore.

I know my daughter will eventually get to the epic adventure part of "Tears of the Kingdom," and I know that, one day, she'll even rescue Zelda, but not until she has made the game world her own and pushed its systems to their limit. Until then, I'll happily watch her Ultrahand the most cockamamie wagon imaginable for her horse to drag up a mountainside. I'll watch her fill her inventory with mushroom skewers and dubious food. I'll watch her sneak up on wild horses, in the interest of breaking and taming them, even though her stable is already at capacity. I'll watch her dye her clothing orange, and then red, and then blue, and then orange again. Her life, I fear, as it plunges deeper into the 21st century, will be filled with far more Challenger disasters than Zelda releases. And so I'll tell her to remember this - the feeling of a world that feels lifted, not collapsed; conquerable, not corrupted; joyful, not terrifying. Remember this. And remember us, too, together. Playing.
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Opinion | What watching my daughter play 'The Legend of Zelda' taught me

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Tom Bissell is an author and screenwriter. His books include "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" and "Creative Types: And Other Stories." The Challenger space shuttle disaster and " The Legend of Zelda " are endlessly entangled in my mind. I'd always remembered - and began writing this essay believing - that, on Jan.

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How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction - Gabor Maté

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It's the silent killer of finances. And society rewards us for it.

The house was still and dark, the kids were asleep, and save for my husband's occasional snore, it was so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen from our bedroom. I should have been knocked out, too.

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It's the silent killer of finances. And society rewards us for it. The house was still and dark, the kids were asleep, and save for my husband's occasional snore, it was so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen from our bedroom.

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I chose this text because it weaves together four informative pieces brilliantly.

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Reading trauma-reading as a potential source of pain, insecurity, humiliation, or stress-disproportionately affects marginalized communities. But educators can interrupt traumatic reading practices in schools and make their spaces healing and inclusive instead.

In "Healing Reading Trauma: Rebuilding a Love of Reading through Libraries for Liberation," a June 24 on-demand program of ALA Virtual, two school librarians offered best practices for building foundations and collections that undo harm.

"We wanted to make sure our libraries are spaces where students not only feel that they are welcome to join in the process of developing a love for reading at any stage, but also that our libraries are practices of liberation," said Julia Torres, teacher-librarian at Denver Public Schools. "We are about student empowerment."

Torres and Julie Stivers, teacher-librarian at Mount Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, began their session by reviewing factors that contribute to reading trauma: high-stakes testing, a fixation on what education systems consider to be classics, toxic or lack of meaningful representation, trauma-centered narratives, and shaming students for reading choices.

"If we're measuring literacy growth only through test scores, we're failing them," said Stivers. She added: "We know how problematic some of the 'classics' are."

To illustrate this point, Torres shared a chart of the New York State Education Department's top 20 book titles read in its public schools (such as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), of which a majority were written by white men and take place in historical time periods.

"A lot of these students don't read these books because they don't feel they relate to the lives that they're living," said Torres, who noted that the top books among her students this year were Long Way Down, The Hate U Give, and The Poet X, as well as poetry, manga, and graphic novels.

To interrupt traumatic practices, Torres and Stivers had several suggestions-the first of which includes realigning the role of the school librarian.

"Students are more important than books. We're not gatekeepers of books, that's not our role," said Stivers. "I would much rather lose a book than a reader."

Other interruption strategies included redefining what "counts" as reading and deploying inclusive programs and policies that emphasize diverse, reflective collections. At Stivers's library, for example, she and her students created a set of guidelines for professional and collection development called the #LibFive, which includes tenets such as "Graphic novels and manga are not extra" and "Show the joy in our stories."

Her library also holds a True Book Fair, in which students are invited to select new books intentionally curated to their interests without any associated cost (as opposed to a traditional book fair, where titles must be purchased).

Citing the ways in which Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about Indigenous people and Harper Lee wrote about Black people, Torres stressed that decolonization is essential to the process. "Decolonizing your mind is something we always have to do and support our students in doing," she said. "Our conversations shouldn't be debating the humanity of characters."

To that end, Stivers cautioned that white librarians should not be acting as "saviors" for their students, but as partners. "I'm not saving my kids because I'm pointing them in the direction of Jason Reynolds and Angie Thomas. I'm not doing things for them; I'm doing things with them." She stressed that librarians should be prepared to read the books themselves and do the antiracist work surrounding the literature.

Overwhelmingly, these strategies have holistic benefits. "When we interrupt traumatic reading practices, it will show up in our circulation data and also in other data throughout the school," said Stivers.

So will other, less tangible benefits: "We honor each other by showing each other we recognize the ways in which our lived experiences may be different," said Torres. "[Students] see the library as a place that's more than transactional."

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Ridding Schools of Reading Trauma | American Libraries Magazine

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Reading trauma-reading as a potential source of pain, insecurity, humiliation, or stress-disproportionately affects marginalized communities. But educators can interrupt traumatic reading practices in schools and make their spaces healing and inclusive instead. In "Healing Reading Trauma: Rebuilding a Love of Reading through Libraries for Liberation," a June 24 on-demand program of ALA Virtual, two school librarians offered best practices for building foundations and collections that undo harm.

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Taylor Swift lyrics as central to a college course on reading and writing... 

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Every January, my social media feeds fill with ads, free trials, and coupons from the diet and wellness industry, promising to help me with my (presumed) resolutions to be better, faster, leaner, and healthier. Every diet program claims some type of relationship to science.

The same is true with reading instruction. Most programs or approaches claim to be based on "science." But consider the many possible meanings of this claim. Some approaches to reading instruction are developed as part of rigorous, peer-reviewed research and are continuously evaluated and refined. Others are designed by practitioners who draw on experience, and whose insights are validated by inquiry after development. Many are based on well-known principles from research or assumptions about learning in general, but haven't themselves been tested. Some "research-based" instructional tools and practices have been shared, explained, interpreted, misinterpreted, and re-shared so many times that they bear little resemblance to the research on which they were based (Gabriel, 2020). Others rack up positive evidence no matter how many times they're studied. Then there are practices that have no evidence behind them but are thought to be scientific-because they've always been assumed to be true.

"Polarizing Pitches"

When it comes to diet and wellness, advertisers work to make complicated choices about food and exercise appear simple and easy. And once phrases like "clinically proven" began to appear on almost every dieting option out there, many products-to stand out-changed their messaging to the now-familiar polarizing pitch, which typically involves one or more of these claims:

This type of promotion is challenging because approaches that seem to conflict with each other both make claims about their own effectiveness and the ineffectiveness of others.

Similar polarizing pitches can now be seen in approaches to early reading instruction. Multiple approaches-often different and even resistant to each other-claim to be scientific and "evidence-based." But too few programs have been examined with gold-standard studies to make comparisons meaningful. And every new evidence-rating system has slightly different recommendations (Gabriel, 2020). The "evidence-based" label seems to have lost its distinctive meaning. Rather than solely asking whether an approach is "evidence-based," most educators now want to know what the individual components of high-quality instruction truly are.

What We Do and Don't Agree On

The challenge, really, is to discern which reading-instruction approach is right for your school community, in what ways, at which times. Understanding what your school or classroom needs for current students is made more difficult by the lack of shared language for common concepts in the field, and the "all-or-nothing" mentality that suggests you must go all one way or another. Moreover, instructional decisions in this area matter tremendously. Just like unbalanced nutrition, the wrong program or combination of approaches can do more than waste time; it can discourage, limit, and minimize students' opportunities to learn. Perhaps this is why discussions about various programs evoke passionate responses from different factions in the "reading wars."

Within every approach to literacy instruction lies a unique logic or way of making sense of the central challenge of literacy development and of the best strategies for dealing with that challenge. Still, there's little disagreement on the non-negotiables of effective reading instruction, even if polarized perspectives use different terminology to describe them. I state these non-negotiables as: Students need developmentally appropriate, precise (explicit) instruction about every strand of literacy (letter patterns, vocabulary, usage, comprehension), instruction that includes clear modeling, plenty of practice, and specific feedback on that practice. There's also little disagreement on these general principles for effective reading instruction:

Reading and writing more is better than reading and writing less.

Clearer specific teaching and feedback is better than vague teaching and feedback.

Code-focused instruction (in which students learn about letter sounds, patterns and word structures) is important, and meaning-focused instruction (where students learn about vocabulary, text structure, discourse, genre and communication patterns) is important. But their successful integration is most important.

This last point is the crux of media representations of the "reading wars" and the conversations and, in some cases, legislation, that has followed. Code-focused instruction, or phonics instruction, has been presented as largely absent in reading instruction, and its absence is viewed as wholly responsible for persistently low achievement in reading (MacPhee, Handsfield, & Paugh 2021).

But the tension between code- and meaning-focused reading instruction has led to pendulum swings toward trends in curriculum and instruction that favor one and then the other for nearly a century. This in itself is problematic, leading to narrow conceptions of what students need.

The principles behind code-focused and meaning-focused reading instruction have been anchored in different fields of study and are best understood by researchers or practitioners in those different fields, so varied terms, philosophies, and approaches will always be at play. For this reason, the term "science of reading" really ought to be plural. Understanding reading development among diverse students requires an understanding of multiple fields of science (bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing), not just one. A myopic focus on just one field leads to deficiencies in one area or another-for teachers and students. And there's mounting agreement that to interrupt the status quo of unequal reading achievement in the United States, research in the science of reading needs to use more diverse tools and perspectives (Milner, 2020).

Soil Scientists and Botanists

In my graduate classes, I refer to people who are heavily invested in code-focused instruction as "soil scientists" because they focus on the foundation in which literacy (considered here as a tree) grows. They're often interested in the granular details of early literacy skills, like phonological and phonemic awareness, that are hidden below the surface for a competent reader. Evidence for instruction here is often drawn from linguistics, speech-language pathology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Foundational skills provide readers with access to written words by "cracking the (alphabetic) code" and allowing students to look at letters and link those letters with sounds that combine into words. Using my tree metaphor, building basic skills is like focusing on the right nutrients and balance within the soil to support the proliferation of skills (roots) that can fuel initial growth-and are vital for the life of the tree. A strong foundation of skill mastery can be the first step to healthy growth in literacy.

I think of educators more heavily invested in meaning- and comprehension-focused instruction as botanists. They are interested in nurturing the tree as it grows: ensuring it has sunlight (language exposure) and water (compelling reasons for reading and exposure to a wide range of text types). Evidence for instruction in this area often drawn from sociology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and communications.

As a tree grows, it sprouts branches that reach out toward its best sources of nutrients. Similarly, students with an interest in and knowledge about a certain topic or genre will extend (read) in that area and grow a stronger, leafier "branch" in that subject. With trees, as more leaves emerge, they provide increased surface area for capturing nutrients from the environment, until the leaves become the main source of nutrients for the tree and its roots. If each leaf represents a student's experience with a text, this metaphor illustrates how reading more can reinforce the brain's understandings of letter- and text-patterns (the roots). Reading more helps a student build content knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and textual knowledge through increased exposure to language and ideas.

What Does This Mean for Teaching Reading?

No tree is the same. Some are well-matched to their current soil environment; others are not, and require more attention to thrive. Similarly, no two students are the same. So, in teaching reading, depending on the needs of the student, there's a time for a focus on the "soil" and a time to focus on nutrients in the environment (texts, talk, and teaching that's explicitly about meaning-making).

A scientific approach to teaching reading would acknowledge that, like a sapling, every student has within them the natural ability to develop literacy. It would acknowledge that each unique student will require different kinds and degrees of support for component skills and the many processes of literacy.

A scientific approach would also acknowledge that any teacher will bring expertise to some, but not all, of the many strands of literacies and pedagogies for teaching those strands. No good botanist can work without knowing something about soil science; no soil scientist succeeds without knowing the parts of trees. But people usually specialize based on their interest and experiences. So, a school leader has to gauge how well a particular teacher's strengths and focus areas align with the school's literacy curriculum and goals-and how much additional training she may need to adapt to her students' needs.

Many argue that basic skills have been neglected and need a renewed focus. However, historically, it's not the presence, absence, or balance of phonics vs. comprehension instruction that always leads to poor outcomes (Bond & Dykstra, 1967); it's the lack of responsive integration of phonics and other instruction (Connor & Morrison, 2016).

It's worth adding that there is an implicit history of inequality behind the reading wars that's rarely discussed in conversations focused on reading science. Historically, code-focused, direct instruction was part of a no-frills, no-nonsense version of literacy teaching (Eppley & Dudley-Marling, 2018; Haberman, 1991). Such instruction was seen to require little teacher expertise to deliver because it's largely scripted or routinized (though delivering it well actually requires significant skill). Under-resourced schools have long seen a revolving door of inexperienced teachers and persistently low test scores which make this approach seem all the more logical.

On the other hand, child-centered, unscripted approaches that depend on teachers' use of data and in-the-moment analysis of student needs have often been the domain of better-resourced schools with experienced teachers who were trusted to make their own instructional decisions. (For information on balancing literacy instruction, see sidebar "How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction.")

Today, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide systematic code-focused instruction (phonics) in a way that is engaging, cohesive, and differentiated. But many do not. This is clear from surveys and interviews with teachers, who say they lacked preparation for the complexity of teaching reading, especially phonics, to diverse learners, despite passing scores on the tests of reading knowledge required for initial certification in many U.S. states (NCTQ, 2020).

Likewise, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide explicit comprehension instruction in a way that's purposeful and integrated with all aspects of written language, from phonics to spelling to grammar. Many do not. This is clear from looking at the questions on standardized tests that students most struggle with and the underlying mental processes, as reflected by recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, 2019) findings. According to the 2019 NAEP, 66 percent of 4th graders tested could do the tasks required to score as "basic," which require little more than accurate word recognition and literal comprehension. However, scoring "proficient" requires inference, judgement, and the ability to construct an argument about ideas drawn from a text. Only 35 percent of U.S. 4th graders scored proficient or advanced.

This pattern suggests that meaning-focused comprehension instruction is neither absent nor adequate. So I would argue that one more pendulum swing towards phonics (to be followed in 15 years by a swing away) would do little to equip educators with the ongoing support they need for cohesive, integrated instruction. Explicit comprehension instruction must engage all levels of language, using culturally sustaining texts, in the context of purposeful activities if students are to develop higher levels of comprehension.

A lack of adequate phonics instruction is surely a social justice issue. A national debt is owed to students whose school experiences haven't included full access to rigorous skill development for reading and writing. Yet teaching students to recognize words without also teaching them to integrate, interpret, apply, judge, critique, and construct arguments about or with them is an example of systematic oppression. If literacy is to liberate, its components must fully integrate.

Needed: An Integrated Approach

Let's return to our comparison of reading programs and diet programs. We seem to have an understanding as a culture that there are multiple evidence-based ways to go about getting in shape, even if some basic principles apply to all of us. We don't seem to have this sort of flexibility about approaches when it comes to beginning reading instruction. But we desperately need it. Significant evidence has accumulated about the different profiles of learners, the varying reasons for students' difficulties with reading, and the need for different forms of instruction to ensure equitable opportunities to develop literacy. Some students need teachers who can build up their foundation for literacy with explicit, teacher-directed instruction. Others need an opportunity for increased independence as their literacies self-extend through engagement with texts they can and want to read.

If science is both a body of knowledge generated through systematic inquiry and a process for generating such knowledge, then embracing the sciences of reading should include embracing the process of inquiry as we implement various reading instruction approaches, as well as embracing research findings to help choose an effective program. Testing out a certain approach and finding it sound doesn't mean a wholesale rejection of all others. Science is tentative, not tyrannical.

Leaders and policymakers should remember that the individual differences that make each of us unique matter for reading instruction. Reading and writing require the orchestration of multiple complex cognitive, social, affective, and linguistic tasks. How well a student performs these tasks is influenced by many factors, only one of which is the type of instruction her teacher uses. Students' individual language histories, cultural knowledge, interests, skills, health, text exposures, and reasons for reading affect their responses to instruction and intervention.

Treating evidence-based programs or approaches as solutions to be applied rather than possibilities to be tried out is problematic. Figuring out who needs what means asking the right questions about our students, instructional routines, and contexts, and having the wisdom, flexibility, and resources to adjust. It means positioning each teacher as the principal investigator of their classroom, someone who consistently inquires about the optimal balance of instructional practices for their current students-and positioning leaders to investigate how teachers are implementing reading instruction.

If anything, science shows us that the diversity of students' responses to instruction-even the same instruction-requires instructors to be flexible in their selection of content and pedagogy to provide equal opportunities for each learner's development.

How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction

So how can school leaders know if they're providing the right balance between a basic-skills-centered and a meaning-centered approach? As described by the IRIS Center at the Peabody College of Education (2021), you'll know whether your approach is delivering sufficient phonics if 80 percent of all students, including those in special education, can read simple texts independently at the end of 1st grade and more complex texts with understanding by the end of 3rd, and if those who require additional support show progress as a result of a short-term (about 3-4 months) intervention.

On the other hand, you'll know your current emphasis (or lack thereof) on phonics has missed the mark if interventions for most students take longer than a few months, and/or if more than 20 percent of students seem to need them. These percentages are based on federal guidelines for RTI models.

Critical Questions on Literacy Instruction

Science is about asking good questions and using those questions to find evidence or explanations that help improve an endeavor. Unfortunately, as H. Richard Milner notes, most research highlighted in current discussions of the science of reading has been conducted on white, monolingual students and may have limited implications for the education of diverse learners, whose pathways to literacy may vary (Milner, 2020). Ethical action in determining effective literacy instruction in the current climate means asking the right questions and responding quickly to the answers. Three questions are a solid start:

1. Is there a pattern based on language, culture, or skill level of students who are well-served by your current curricular approach? How would a rebalancing or reintegration of instruction help you better serve students not in this group?

2. Are all students engaged in meaningful practice in reading? If so, are there ways you might make such practice even more engaging, meaningful, and inclusive? If, on the other hand, students are practicing isolated skills without opportunities for integration, or reading without building skills for more complex engagement, what missing instruction or opportunities for integration could you provide?

3. Is this approach bearing fruit? This is the key question when weighing whether the literacy instruction approach you consider scientific-and have been trying out-is right for your students and teachers. Even if individual measures or skills show growth, ask whether all students are increasingly independent, engaged, and flexible as readers and writers-and if not, why not.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ What are your greatest concerns about current trends and programs in early-reading instruction? Why?

➛ Consider examples of effective reading instruction you've observed or participated in. What are the key components or characteristics of such instruction?

➛ Do you agree with Gabriel that schools need "flexibility" in their approaches to reading instruction? What does flexibility mean to you in this context?

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When it comes to reading instruction, an "all or nothing" approach is actually unscientific.

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Creative writing craft here... Inside the Minds of Antiwar Russians

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Creative writing craft here... Inside the Minds of Antiwar Russians

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Video: Opinion | Inside the Minds of Antiwar Russians: ‘Silence Is My Punishment Now’

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Some Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine are experiencing an existential crisis marked by sorrow and regret.

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The digital piece works well with the article here.

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The digital piece works well with the article here.

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‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens

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Depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among American adolescents. For one 13-year-old, the despair was almost too much to take.

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Good model to show a writer "in conversation" with sources. Includes summary, analysis, and synthesis.

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Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

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The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.

The government survey of almost 8,000 high-school students, which was conducted in the first six months of 2021, found a great deal of variation in mental health among different groups. More than one in four girls reported that they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, which was twice the rate of boys. Nearly half of LGBTQ teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers. Sadness among white teens seems to be rising faster than among other groups.

But the big picture is the same across all categories: Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it's happening all across the country. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race; for straight teens and gay teens; for teens who say they've never had sex and for those who say they've had sex with males and/or females; for students in each year of high school; and for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

So why is this happening?

I want to propose several answers to that question, along with one meta-explanation that ties them together. But before I start with that, I want to squash a few tempting fallacies.

The first fallacy is that we can chalk this all up to teens behaving badly. In fact, lots of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction. Since the 1990s, drinking-and-driving is down almost 50 percent. School fights are down 50 percent. Sex before 13 is down more than 70 percent. School bullying is down. And LGBTQ acceptance is up.

The second fallacy is that teens have always been moody, and sadness looks like it is rising only because people are more willing to talk about it. Objective measures of anxiety and depression- such as eating disorders, self-harming behavior, and teen suicides-are sharply up over the past decade. "Across the country we have witnessed dramatic increases in Emergency Department visits for all mental health emergencies including suspected suicide attempts," the American Academy of Pediatrics said in October. Today's teenagers are more comfortable talking about mental health, but rising youth sadness is no illusion.

The third fallacy is that today's mental-health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID. "Rising teenage sadness isn't a new trend, but rather the acceleration and broadening of a trend that clearly started before the pandemic," Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, told me. But he added: "We shouldn't ignore the pandemic, either. The fact that COVID seems to have made teen mental health worse offers clues about what's really driving the rise in sadness."

Here are four forces propelling that increase.
1. Social-media use
Five years ago, the psychologist Jean Twenge wrote an influential and controversial feature in The Atlantic titled "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" based on her book iGen. Around 2012, Twenge wrote, she had noticed that teen sadness and anxiety began to steadily rise in the U.S. and other rich developed countries. She looked for explanations and realized that 2012 was precisely when the share of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent and mobile social-media use spiked.

In the past few years, scientists have disputed the idea that social-media use itself makes teenagers miserable. "There's been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects," Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies, told The New York Times recently.

But I think Twenge's strongest point is misunderstood. Social media isn't like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. It's more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.

This is very close to the conclusion reached by none other than Instagram. The company's internal research from 2020 found that, while most users had a positive relationship with the app, one-third of teen girls said "Instagram made them feel worse," even though these girls "feel unable to stop themselves" from logging on. And if you don't believe a company owned by Facebook, believe a big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages and found that social media was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13.

Why would social media affect teenage mental health in this way? One explanation is that teenagers (and teenage girls in particular) are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd. As I've written, social media seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity. The problem isn't just that social media fuels anxiety but also that-as we'll see-it makes it harder for today's young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.
2. Sociality is down
Both Steinberg and Twenge stress that the biggest problem with social media might be not social media itself, but rather the activities that it replaces.

"I tell parents all the time that if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I'm not concerned about it," Steinberg told me. But today's teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit seems to be displacing quite a lot of beneficial activity. The share of high-school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30 percent from 2007 to 2019. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today's teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver's license, or play youth sports.

The pandemic and the closure of schools likely exacerbated teen loneliness and sadness. A 2020 survey from Harvard's Graduate School of Education found that loneliness spiked in the first year of the pandemic for everyone, but it rose most significantly for young people. "It's well established that what protects teens from stress is close social relationships," Steinberg said. "When kids can't go to school to see their friends and peers and mentors, that social isolation could lead to sadness and depression, particularly for those predisposed to feeling sad or depressed."

This is important to say clearly: Aloneness isn't the same as loneliness, and loneliness isn't the same as depression. But more aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world.
3. The world is stressful-and there is more news about the world's stressors
Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author, told me that no single factor can account for the rise of teenage sadness. But she believes a part of the answer is that the world has become more stressful. Or, at least, teenagers' perception of the world seems to be causing them more stress.

"In the last decade teenagers have become increasingly stressed by concerns about gun violence, climate change, and the political environment," she wrote in an email. "Increased stress among young people is linked to increasing levels of sadness. Girls, more than boys, are socialized to internalize distress, meaning that they tend to collapse in on themselves by becoming depressed or anxious."

Fears about finances, climate change, and viral pandemics are smashing into local concerns about social approval and setting oneself up for success. "I think of it as a pile-on effect," Steinberg said. "We're coming out of the pandemic, and then suddenly Russia goes to war. Every day, it feels like there's something else. It creates a very gloomy narrative about the world."

This sense of doom doesn't just come from teenagers. It comes from us, the news media, and from the social-media channels through which our work is distributed. News sources have never been more abundant, or more accessible. But journalism also has a famous bad-news bias, which flows from an unfortunate but accurate understanding that negativity generally gets more attention. When we plug our brain into a news feed, we are usually choosing to deluge ourselves with negative representations of reality. A well-known 2019 experiment randomly forced people to stop using Facebook for four weeks before a midterm election. The study found that those who logged off spent more time hanging out with family and friends, consistent with the idea that social-media use displaces pro-social behaviors. It also found that deactivating Facebook "reduced factual news knowledge" while "increasing subjective well-being." We cannot rule out the possibility that teens are sad about the world, not only because the world contains sadness, but also because young people have 24/7 access to sites that are constantly telling them they should be depressed about it.
4. Modern parenting strategies
In the past 40 years, American parents-especially those with a college degree- have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend coaching, chauffeuring, tutoring, and otherwise helping their teenage children. The economist Valerie Ramey has labeled this the " rug rat race." High-income parents in particular are spending much more time preparing their kids for a competitive college admissions process. When I interviewed Ramey about her work in 2019, she told me that she "couldn't believe the amount of pressure our friends were putting on their kids to get ready for college."

The "rug rat race" is an upper-class phenomenon that can't explain a generalized increase in teenage sadness. But it could well explain part of what's going on. And in the 2020 Atlantic feature "What Happened to American Childhood?," Kate Julian described a related phenomenon that affects families a bit more broadly: Anxious parents, in seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.

I want to pull out two points from Julian's complex essay. First, children are growing up slower than they used to. Today's children are less likely to drive, get a summer job, or be asked to do chores. The problem isn't that kids are lazy (homework time has risen), or that scrubbing dishes magically dispels anxiety disorders. Rather, Julian wrote, these activities "provide children with two very important things": tolerating discomfort and having a sense of personal competence.

Second, researchers have noted a broad increase in an "accommodative" parenting style. If a girl is afraid of dogs, an "accommodation" would be keeping her away from every friend's house with a dog, or if a boy won't eat vegetables, feeding him nothing but turkey loaf for four years ( an actual story from the article). These behaviors come from love. But part of growing up is learning how to release negative emotions in the face of inevitable stress. If kids never figure out how to do that, they're more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers.

Julian highlighted a new treatment out of Yale University's Child Study Center called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. Put simply, SPACE forces parents to be less accommodating. If the girl is afraid of dogs, encourage her to play with young puppies. If the boy hates vegetables, caramelize the hell out of some broccoli. This sort of advice is infinitely easier to type than to put into practice. But folding a bit of exposure therapy into modern parenting and childhood might help teenagers grapple with a complex and stressful world.

Other explanations don't fit neatly into the above categories. Maybe drugs are a big factor: One study found that a sixth of the increase in teen suicides was associated with parental opioid addiction. Maybe the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt are right that college campuses and internet culture have come to celebrate fragility. Maybe political polarization is fueling anxiety, not only by creating mutual hatred but also by encouraging people to reject opposing views, which over time reduces their capacity to handle cognitive dissonance in a confusing world.

The truth is I'm not satisfied by any of the above explanations, on their own. But I see no reason to keep them alone. They interact, amplify, and compound. And together they paint a powerful picture.

The world is overwhelming, and an inescapably negative news cycle creates an atmosphere of existential gloom, not just for teens but also for their moms and dads. The more overwhelming the world feels to parents, the more they may try to bubble-wrap their kids with accommodations. Over time, this protective parenting style deprives children of the emotional resilience they need to handle the world's stresses. Childhood becomes more insular: Time spent with friends, driving, dating, and working summer jobs all decline. College pressures skyrocket. Outwardly, teens are growing up slower; but online, they're growing up faster. The internet exposes teenagers not only to supportive friendships but also to bullying, threats, despairing conversations about mental health, and a slurry of unsolvable global problems-a carnival of negativity. Social media places in every teen's pocket a quantified battle royal for scarce popularity that can displace hours of sleep and makes many teens, especially girls, feel worse about their body and life. Amplify these existing trends with a global pandemic and an unprecedented period of social isolation, and suddenly, the remarkable rise of teenage sadness doesn't feel all that mysterious, does it?

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

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Figure skaters stroke westward on the half-mile-long skating trail on the frozen Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vt., in January. (Photos by Anne Kenderdine/The Washington Post)

The sky was sliding toward periwinkle and the skate rentals had closed for the day, so there were few witnesses when my daughter pushed off onto the frozen lake. She had brought her own figure skates, and she stroked away decisively. In my boots atop a thin layer of snow, I watched her, as I've done so many times at skating lessons for five of her 14 years. Except on Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vt., in the January twilight, there was no wall to lean on, no high-powered spotlights, no pop songs pumping from speakers and no reason for her to have to turn around.

I couldn't see my daughter's face in the distance, but I tried to gauge her reaction to the lake's organic expanse, so different from the gated, manufactured ovals she was used to skating on. She pivoted, played with footwork and whirled in a scratch spin. She finally whooshed to a stop where I stood. "I feel like I'm flying," she said.

Maybe, I hoped, this crazy trip was worth it.

When my daughter shared her wish to skate on natural ice, Lake Morey Resort seemed an easy answer. Just off Interstate 91 along the New Hampshire border, itis known for maintainingone of the longest groomed and monitored skating loops in the country, about four miles following the lake's perimeter. Although longer U.S. trails have been created by volunteer-run organizations during the pandemic, this one has a toasty hotel, as well as dining next to the lake. I wouldn't have to spend any time outdoors in Vermont's single-digit temperatures unless I was exercising.

Things to do in Burlington

And there were plenty of ways to do that. The resort offers so many kinds of gear that guests inspired by the Winter Olympics in Beijing can try several of the sports played in the Games. Figure skates, hockey skates and sticks, cross-country skis, and fluorescent-colored sleds that can be pulled on the lake or used as a pseudo luge at a sledding hill on the resort grounds are on offer. The Nordic skates, ideal for stability over the small bumps and natural fissures on wild surfaces, are like skis in the way the boot and long, wide blade are separate pieces that clip together. The blade only connects to the boot at the toe with a hinge, so when skaters lift their foot, the back of the blade releases and swings free. There are also snowshoes, ice scooters (to be used with provided crampons for traction), and a bicycle with one fat back tire and two yellow skis in lieu of the front one.

At home, my daughter spends hours at rinks indoors and out, but she prefers to skate in the elements once our local outdoor rink opens for the season. During that first pandemic winter, the routine and endorphin-generating vigor of skating at the outdoor rink were critical in lifting our family's spirits, giving us purpose and a place to see friends. I wanted our late-January trip to be a supersize infusion of that joy, an emotion that was in short supply during months of anxiety and virtual school.

Lake Morey seemed to offer freedom from worry. All over the country, if winter is biting enough, ponds, rivers and lakes will freeze and become skateable for a time. But Mother Nature's sheets are uneven and unpredictable. At the lake, the ice is evaluated daily and maintained by a fleet of plows and motorized brushes to streamline it and make skating possible.

The fleeting season when the trail is open for ice skating makes those days more magical. It usually opens by Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January and closes near the end of February, although it has opened as early as New Year's Day. Like any outdoor venue, it is subject to the vicissitudes of nature: Earlier this month, the trail was temporarily closed to skaters after a pair of storms left slush and standing water on the lake.This year, the unusual weather patterns have meant the resort has been unable to open the four-mile perimeter trail, but it has opened a half-mile loop and cleared "rinks" on the southeast part of the lake next to the hotel.

7 of the most-vaccinated places you can travel in the U.S.

When we looked out at the lake from our hotel room on our first morning at the resort, crews were already brushing snow from the ice, and skaters were moving on cleared stretches and on the shorter loop.

As much as I had loved having the 547-acre lake mostly to ourselves the evening before, I delighted in the morning energy. There were college-age hockey players ribbing each other, a small child living his best hygge life while nestled on a sheepskin on a sled towed by an adult skater, people propelling scooters made with two skis, dogs galloping alongside skaters, three generations of a family meeting friends, and preschoolers on an outdoor playdate. Practiced Nordic skaters zipped around the loop, bent forward with hands clasped behind their backs.

My daughter told me to look where I was going instead of down, but I was fascinated by the navy-gray lake's texture. The ice was etched by blades and naturally occurring cracks; it looked to me as if we were skimming across pavement instead of a freshwater bowl averaging 24 feet deep. She briefly tested the Nordic skates, too, but quickly switched to experiment with hockey skates.

By the afternoon, as more clouds set in, I was starting to get the hang of the Nordic skates and had settled into a rhythm, lifting my feet off the ice and hearing the metallic thwunk as the skate blade extended. I was concentrating on sustaining my pace when my daughter pointed out a hot-air balloon sailing above the lake. The yellow-and-red color-blocked canopy, powered by hot air, seemed incongruous in the white winter landscape. "It's going to land on the lake," she predicted, and she was right. Next, two seaplanes - one red, one yellow - swooped over us, touching down with their skis on the lake's northern tip, as skaters paused and pointed.

After a day of skating, we wanted to take advantage of all the gear at hand and try a sport we had never attempted. We chose the cross-country skis, and the woman outfitting us directed us to the lake. It was a Monday morning, and we were the only people on it.

On skis, we sought the thick stack of snow untouched by plows or human tracks and headed north, paralleling the shoreline and what seemed an early pass at plowing the longer perimeter trail.

Farther north on the lake than we had found passable with skates, I tried to internalize the views my dad must have seen when he trained here in the late-aughts for a long-distance Nordic skating race in Stockholm. His passion for skating had skipped a generation, to the granddaughter who was 2 when he died. A pond hockey player as a boy and a longtime outdoorsman, he pursued Nordic skating when the Vermonter who initiated the Lake Morey trail began raising the sport's profile stateside. My dad and my daughter never skated together, and he never saw her camel spins and toe loops. But their shared yearning to skate in nature drew us here, and the landscape connected us to his experience, the same exhilaration of being able to flow across the stilled water.

Hills of hemlock and white pine sloping eastward toward Morey Mountaincast triangles of shade on our course with points far beyond us; the only way to eyeball our progress was to keep shuffling and skidding toward their tips when we would emerge into the sun.

When we did, the crystallized crust on the snow sparkled dizzyingly. I could hardly hear my panting over the crackle of skis and poles. We glimpsed ice fishers walking in the distance, but otherwise, we were alone with the brilliant cover above, the pristine, glittering frost below.
Lake Morey Resort
82 Clubhouse Rd., Fairlee, Vt.

800-423-1211

This lakeside resort in the Vermont Hills above the Connecticut River has maintained the skating loop on Lake Moreysince 2011, taking over efforts started by volunteersin 2000. Ice conditions are updated on Facebook, Instagram and a phone line. Access to the lake is free to all; rentals of figure and hockey skates, cross-country skis, snowshoes and sleds are free for hotel guests. Hotel guests can rent Nordic skates free for two hours. For day visitors, figure and hockey skates rentals $17; Nordic skates, $30; helmets, $10; hockey sticks, $5; and kid skate trainers, $10. Kickspark scooters, $40 for a full day and $30 after 1 p.m.Classic room, two double beds with garden or golf-course view, from $179 per night. Hotel restaurant is open 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Clubhouse Bar & Restaurant is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.
PLEASE NOTE
Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC's travel health notice webpage.

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In Vermont, gliding along on natural ice

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The sky was sliding toward periwinkle and the skate rentals had closed for the day, so there were few witnesses when my daughter pushed off onto the frozen lake. She had brought her own figure skates, and she stroked away decisively.

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Many terrific informational podcasts out there!

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Many terrific informational podcasts out there!

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Latest Breaking News, U.S. and World Politics, Crime, Business, Science, Technology, Autos, Entertainment, Culture, Movie, Music, Sports.

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Opinion | Malala: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters. (Published 2021)

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In the past two decades, millions of Afghan women and girls received an education. Now the future they were promised is in imminent danger.

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On having a twin with cerebral palsy and navigating school bullies.