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"Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn’t prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments."

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Why They Can't Write | Johns Hopkins University Press Books

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Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged.

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This WAPO  essay describes a mother's efforts to teach her children empathy by having them reflect on moments of tension and conflict in their lives, identifying the emotions and debriefing how they handled them and how they might handle them in the future.  She talks about neuroplasticity and strengthening neural pathways through practice.  This brings to mind a New Yorker review of Sorkin's adaptation of Mockingbird for the theater.  The magazine's critic argued that Atticus was a slender Trump in a white suit saying there is goodness to be found in a neo-Nazi, for example. A magazine reader wrote back this week pointing out that this is not Atticus, that Mockingbird is all about learning empathy by respecting the human decency (or the potential for it) in everyone.  This is the heart of the book, Atticus's advice about walking around in someone else's skin--specifically Miss Caroline's in the advice he gives to Scout after the first day of first grade.  The WAPO essay and our readings remind me of the importance of practice in terms of skills and content as well as empathy.  Essential question:  How does this text (any text) teach empathy?  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/01/04/cultivating-empathy-my-children-neuroscience-perspective/?utm_term=.71a0002b64d9

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Perspective | Cultivating empathy in my children, from a neuroscience perspective

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January 4 It was a typically harried school morning, with the kids packed three across the back seat by 7:30 a.m. But it was no normal school morning. Katherine woke up to find her beloved pet rabbit dead in its cage.

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Express gratitude helps people to  sleep better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. Earlier this year, a study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered generosity among adolescents.

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"I think just over the last few years there's been more of a trend to focus on gratitude," says psychologist Laurie Santos, who teaches a course on the science of well-being and happiness at Yale.

Gratitude is being endorsed by wellness blogs and magazines. You can buy different kinds of specific gratitude journals, or download apps that remind you to jot down your blessings.

"Those types of products can remind us to take time to be grateful," Santos says. "But it's also important to remember that gratitude is free."

And noting your gratitude seems to pay off: There's a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude. Studies have found that giving thanks and counting blessings can help people sleep better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. Earlier this year, a study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered generosity among adolescents.

In another study from August, high school students who were asked to keep gratitude journals also reported healthier eating. There's also some evidence it could lower your risk of heart disease and lower symptoms of depression for some people.

That's why gratitude features heavily in Santos' happiness class. "It's one of the practices that really wins out from the field of positive psychology," she says, because it takes very little time, and "the benefits are so powerful."

Making gratitude lists is one way of accessing those benefits. You could thank God or the universe. You could keep your gratitude private or share it with others. The best way of accessing and expressing gratitude may be different for each person.

Santos' students, in addition to keeping gratitude journals, are asked to write a thank you letter and then read it out loud to the recipient. "I can show measurable improvements in well-being even a month after you've done this," Santos says.

What works for some people may not work for others. To find your best method, "[r]eally think about what feels right and what feels natural or meaningful to you," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who studies happiness and gratitude.

Some may find that a daily dose of gratitude in the morning can be transformative. "It helps me feel awake and abundantly joyful," says Sam Khazai, a 38-year-old actor based in New York, who uses a journal that prompts him to list three things he's grateful for each day.

"I know it sounds kind of meta," he says. "But practicing gratitude, it brings me so much gratitude in and of itself."

There have been times, however, when he has skipped a day or even several days when he's felt especially down. "Or if I don't skip those days, I've straight up lied to my own gratitude journal ... I've filled it with things I hoped to be grateful for," he says - but he didn't feel grateful, and forcing it felt bad.

"Gratitude is a very rich emotion, but it's also kind of a complicated one," notes Lyubomirsky. "Sometimes when you express gratitude, you could also feel humbled or indebted or embarrassed. So it doesn't always feel pleasant."

In one study Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that counting blessings once a week boosted happiness, but doing so three times a week didn't. "That suggests that for most people, at least on average, three times a week was too much," she says. "And too much gratitude can sort of backfire."

There's also a lack of research on how gratitude exercises affect people with clinical depression, anxiety or suicidal tendencies, Lyubomirsky says. "If you're depressed, and you're asked to express gratitude ... you might have trouble thinking of what you're grateful for, or you may feel really guilty you haven't paid back that person you're grateful for."

Indeed, for all the research on the broad benefits of expressing gratitude, there's also evidence that it isn't for everyone. And it isn't a panacea - it can't make injustice, loss, or pain disappear.

What gratitude can do is give us hope. "The research shows that focusing on the positive, in addition to the negative, can boost our mood more than we expect," says Santos.

In Oakland, Calif., 31-year-old mental health counselor Zeyda Garcia agrees. During really tough times, like when she'd lost a job and was sleeping on her friend's mom's couch - she felt like she was reaching for reasons to be grateful.

But she still tried to find some. "Even if it's just - I'm grateful for the sun that's shining or being able to wake up," she says. It felt hokey, and "kind of fake, a little bit."

But ultimately, it helped. "It allowed me to ground myself," she says. "It allowed me to remember what was going well, in a world full of chaos."

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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How Writing Down What You're Thankful For Can Be Good For Mental and Physical Health

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"I think just over the last few years there's been more of a trend to focus on gratitude," says psychologist Laurie Santos, who teaches a course on the science of well-being and happiness at Yale. Gratitude is being endorsed by wellness blogs and magazines.

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Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Appolonius, Virgil by Calres Rowan Beye

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Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Appolonius, Virgil by Calres Rowan Beye

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Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil by Charles Rowan Boye includes an analysis of the structure and content of The Odyssey.  Most useful:  Beye's analysis of the epic as comedy that includes elements of saga and folktale.  He also discusses the place of women as power-brokers in the story.  This comes after his suggestion that this is a text about a marginalized hero who might be best appreciated by marginalized people.  Evidence: Odysseus, and many other characters, often communicate via subtext, a method unnecessary to people with power, who speak directly.

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Drawing on a wealth of ancient and modern sources, Charles Rowan Beye offers enlightening interpretations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and of two other epic masterpieces--Apollonius's Argonautica and Virgil's Aeneid "An authoritative book about classical epic, with a fine-tuned sense for literature as literature, written by a scholar who really knows how to write."--Gregory Nagy, Harvard University

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The Struggle to Save Our Schools:  Preserving democracy will mean preserving the democratic qualities of public education.  Deserves thought on a socioeconomic as well as a racial level.

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As a result of the 1974 decision, many Northern city desegregation orders were restricted to urban areas. In Boston, the limited, city-based racial desegregation order received enormous pushback and was widely regarded as a failure. The order spawned white flight to the suburbs, leaving behind groups of working-class white and black students, who didn't experience the achievement benefits associated with broader socioeconomic integration. Moreover, white working-class families seethed at the double standard under which wealthy white suburban liberals lectured them about the importance of integration but did not involve their own children in the enterprise.

In contrast, many Southern desegregation plans included both cities and suburbs because, in that region of the country, the two tend to lie within single county-wide school systems. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there was no easy escape hatch for white flight, because suburbs were part of the plan. And because more affluent suburban students were included, the plan brought about socioeconomic as well as racial integration. This was critical because research had long found, going back to the 1966 congressionally-authorized Coleman Report, that the "beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites." The Charlotte plan produced strong achievement gains, and in 1984, when Ronald Reagan came to town and harshly denounced busing, his remarks "fell utterly flat and met only silence."

America's experiment with desegregation was short-lived, as the New York Times reporter Nikole-Hannah Jones has demonstrated in her writing on the state of today's schools. In the 1990s, the William Rehnquist Court began releasing jurisdictions from desegregation orders. And in 2007, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the John Roberts Court went further and struck down racial integration plans that had been voluntarily adopted by school boards in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington. In order to promote school diversity, the plans treated students differently based on race, which Roberts saw as a violation of Brown. "Before Brown," he wrote, "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again-even for very different reasons."

Driver, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer at the time of the Parents Involved case, quotes Breyer's powerful response: "Segregation policies did not simply tell schoolchildren 'where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin'; they perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination." Breyer wrote that efforts to continue racial segregation are not "constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration." Breyer was reaching back to the larger meaning of Brown: that separate schooling for America's most vulnerable populations undermines the democratic purposes of public education.

Driver goes further to point out that the rationale for using race is even stronger at the K-12 level than in higher education-where the Supreme Court has upheld racial preferences in admissions. The benefits of diversity in the K-12 classroom, Driver observes, apply "even more compellingly during the students' most formative years of schooling." Moreover, a white or Asian high school senior rejected for racial reasons from a selective college after years of hard work surely has a stronger claim than a five-year-old whose race is a factor in not being admitted to his or her parents' preferred Kindergarten.

The New York Times denounced the Parents Involved decision with an editorial entitled, "Resegregation Now." But, Driver says, the practical effect of the decision has been limited in some areas because a number of school districts, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, have shifted to socioeconomic status (such as eligibility for subsidized lunch) as a basis for integration. These plans provide successful "workarounds" to Parents Involved because it is perfectly legal to classify students by socioeconomic status, and because class-based integration produces a lot of racial diversity.

The socioeconomic plans are not merely a clever legal ploy by which to circumvent the Supreme Court. They are also consistent with the social science research finding that the economic status of classmates drives achievement more than race. Today, 100 school districts and charter school chains educating 4 million students use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment. Among them is Charlotte, which adopted a plan in 2016 to admit an equal number of low, medium, and high socioeconomic status students to its magnet schools. (The plan, which I assisted Charlotte in creating, was adopted one day after Donald Trump's election.)

When it comes to the critical issue of private school vouchers, Driver is far less persuasive. A central plank in the Trump and Betsy DeVos agenda, vouchers have been found to increase racial and socioeconomic segregation in numerous societies where they have been tried, from Sweden to Chile to Denmark. Yet Driver endorses the idea, against the wisdom of his former boss, Justice Breyer, who noted that vouchers threaten to balkanize American society along religious lines. Driver argues that it is unfair to trap low-income students in failing schools and that vouchers offer those children a way out. Here, he may be reflecting on his own experience as a young student who, living in a poor neighborhood in Washington D.C., had the chance to attend a public school in an affluent area where, he says, "the educational outcomes were much brighter."

But a system of public school choice-like the one Driver availed himself of-is crucially different from a voucher system. It answers the plea for better opportunities, without taking the dangerous step of outsourcing the teaching of democracy to private institutions.

Ewing pays closer attention to the importance of a school not just to individual students but also to a whole community, as a source of meaning and pride. In a book brimming with insights, she traces the long history of black struggle with Chicago officials who purposefully created an "invisible fence" to keep parts of the city-including the Bronzeville section on Chicago's South side-cordoned off from the rest. The NAACP valiantly fought school segregation but, facing resistance from the powers that be, many black leaders eventually shifted their focus to community control of black schools, and despite enormous obstacles, a number of Bronzeville community members thrived. Over the years, the neighborhood produced Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, jazz musician Nat King Cole, and novelist Richard Wright.

University of Chicago Press, 240 pp., $22.50

The school closings took that control away from the community again. Ewing cogently argues that the closings were particularly painful, because in African American communities they are "part of a broader pattern of disrespect for people of color." Against the background of slavery, in which black families were routinely dispersed to different communities, she says, the division of school communities rang with an unfortunate familiarity. "I feel like I'm at a slave auction," one black resident tells school officials, "begging you to keep my family together. Don't take them and separate them." One community member pleaded with school officials: "You are destroying a family for many children who don't always have the easiest family situations at their homes."

One practical concern for Chicago students, Ewing notes, is the way in which new school feeder patterns can force students to traverse different gang territories. In 2009, for example, one student was beaten to death during a fight, which Ewing says, was "attributed to a student conflict after a school closure and consolidation." To add insult to injury, many of the schools closed in Chicago were named after prominent African Americans. A school named for black suffragist Mary C. Terrell became ACE Technical Charter School, Sojourner Truth Elementary School became the Chicago International Charter School, and Ralph J. Bunche Elementary School became Providence Englewood Charter School. Ewing sharply points out the effect: "That's how you get black history to go away."

The closings might have made more sense if the new schools that students attended were clearly superior, but that was rarely the case. A 2009 study found that after an early round of school closures in Chicago, only 6 percent of students transferred to top performing schools. Almost half went to the lowest performing schools where their scores in math and reading on average declined. Finally, unlike in any other Illinois jurisdictions, the Chicago School Board is not elected by the public. (Members are appointed by the mayor). This unusual arrangement added to a sense of powerlessness.

Ewing's stunning account of this recent history underlines the staggering challenge we face in creating the schools necessary to sustain our democracy. We have moved so far away from the concept of equal opportunity for disadvantaged African American students that parents are no longer just fighting for high-quality integrated schools, or even high-quality segregated schools. They are fighting for the right to preserve mediocre schools because what they are likely to be provided in the event of school closure is even worse.

At a time when our democracy is under stress, Ewing and Driver outline two important paths for strengthening America's commitment to democratic values. Both require schools to reinforce the lessons about democracy found in textbooks by doing something much harder: asking the adults to model those values. Ewing's detailed on-the-ground reporting calls on leaders to give basic respect to vulnerable communities and give them a voice in important decisions. Driver goes even further, as he calls on schools to challenge the racial and economic inequality in the broader society. He has the audacity to contend that low-income, black, and brown children have an equal right to share space with more privileged students in a system of public education. Anything less would be undemocratic.

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As a result of the 1974 decision, many Northern city desegregation orders were restricted to urban areas. In Boston, the limited, city-based racial desegregation order received enormous pushback and was widely regarded as a failure. The order spawned white flight to the suburbs, leaving behind groups of working-class white and black students, who didn't experience the achievement benefits associated with broader socioeconomic integration.

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A worthwhile feedback strategy when reviewing writing:  Highlight the "trivial" (mechanical, grammatical, stylistic) and comment on the substantive.  The writers sometimes self-correct their highlighted errors; otherwise, the highlights point to a brief lesson.

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This teacher provides feedback that directs students to look at their errors without any teacher corrections.  She does not provide a grade.  Students reap the reward of finding their own mistakes and learning from them.  Raises the question of when the summative grade is final.  (When the learning is accomplished.  This means summatives are formative....)

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"I see that now when I give tests back, they're continuing to learn," Alcala said.

The students get their grade a day later on PowerSchool, and they're given opportunities to retake the test after they've digested their mistakes.

Alcala also projects "favorite mistakes" on the board that they talk about as a class. And students get time to look at their own mistakes and figure out where they went wrong. The other advantage of highlighting is that she can call attention to things that she won't necessarily take points off for, but that she wants students to notice. For example, she might highlight that they didn't put the correct units in a word problem. They got the math correct, so Alcala is not worried they won't be able to move forward, but she wants to remind them that units are important.

She grades in two go-rounds. First she reads the test from top to bottom, looking for the moment when the mistake gets made in each problem. Sometimes she sees what she calls "flow through mistakes," where the student made a mistake early on, thus got the wrong answer, but all the operations after that were done correctly. Other times a mistake was made early on, but more mistakes were made after that. Those two students would receive different grades on that problem, even though they technically both got it wrong.

After the first pass of the test, Alcala looks at the test as a whole for themes in the kinds of mistakes the child is making. Is she making the same mistake over and over? Or are there lots of different types of mistakes?

"It doesn't take longer to grade tests this way," Alcala said. "I think that was a big fear. It is a similar amount of time and it's far more enjoyable."

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A Grading Strategy That Puts the Focus on Learning From Mistakes

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"I see that now when I give tests back, they're continuing to learn," Alcala said. The students get their grade a day later on PowerSchool, and they're given opportunities to retake the test after they've digested their mistakes. Alcala also projects "favorite mistakes" on the board that they talk about as a class.

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Practical suggestions about student choice, including student questions.  She makes some interesting comments about creating choice in essay writing--how to structure and organize an essay, for example. Students determine organization and structure based on audience and purpose as well as content.

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1. People to Work With. Give students the chance to choose whether to work independently or with another student(s). As a teacher, you can still maintain some control by giving students input. Poll them to see the four students they would most want to work with and then give them the guarantee that at least one of those students will be working with them. Let's face it, life would be great if nobody got left out of the picking process or if every student felt welcomed in every group, but teachers might want to maintain some input here as well, if only to help students who socially need the push. Nevertheless, give students the ability to have some say in their coworkers. Don't you wish you could have some say in yours?

2. Resources to Use. Guide students in how to research, but don't point them to every possible resource. Help foster independent learning by giving them the choice in what they are learning from.

3. Driving Questions. In inquiry-based learning, students tend to develop their own questions that require research in order to form a solution. Being able to develop these questions, the questions that drive the learning, is not a small task, and can be used as their own informal assessment as well. By allowing students to set the train on the track, you will have them buying into the learning throughout the journey.

4. Ways to Show Their Knowledge. As Marzano said above, there are many ways in which a student can show what they know about the content area. From essays to dramatic interpretations, from digital slideshows to sculptures, from websites to podcasts, students can prove their knowledge and give evidence of their learning in an infinite number of ways.

5. Which Rubric to Be Scored On. Some teachers have taken to developing different rubrics that reflect different levels of understanding. In other words, if students feel they are ready, they can attach the advanced rubric to their essay or if they feel they aren't quite ready for that challenge, they can be assessed using a more standard or grade-level rubric. Rubrics can also be used to assess different elements of an assignment. Just imagine a student setting their own goals and then selecting the rubric to match that goal.

6. What They Need to Work on to Improve/Learning Goals. And speaking of setting goals, allow students to set their own goals and objectives. When I have my students begin the revision stage of essay writing, for instance, I always have them first state what they choose to have me look for in order to give more targeted feedback. In so doing, they not only show me that they are reflective and aware of the skill they need to work on, but they also pay closer attention to the feedback overall.

For instance, one student used the commenting tool in Google Drive to indicate what she wanted me to look for as I was reading her initial essay. She asked me the following:

Katie: How should I change my title to make it seem like a strong representation of the theme?

Student choice, therefore, helps me to help them.

7. Ways to View and Record Assignments for Time Management. Tweens and teens continue to need advice in how to manage their time, but they don't all connect with the same methods. Therefore, I give my students three different choices as ways to record their assignments or track their assignments. This is yet another way that choice feeds into our mission to differentiate.

Weekly: I post our classroom and homework online each week. On Mondays, students see what the upcoming week holds. This allows students to plan their workload and know when things are due in manageable pieces.

Daily: I break down each day on the board and let students know what we are doing throughout the period. Some students really can only take in bite-sized information at a time.

Quarter/Semester: I give students a rough timeline of what the quarter or semester looks like including key dates when larger assignments are due. Some students find this overwhelming, while others really like the overarching knowledge of what's to come.

8. Scaffolds. By the time students get to middle school, it's really vital that they have a choice in how they take notes or in what scaffolds to use. I'm not a fan of dictating what Thinking Map to use or if a student needs to use one at all. However, if they learned one earlier that they continue to rely on, why not allow them to use it? There might also be a different kind of graphic organizer that does help them. Perhaps a student likes using Cornell Notes, while others might prefer index cards or a digital program like Evernote. We can dictate that a brainstorming element needs to be included in the learning process, but we shouldn't be dictating for students the scaffold that works best for them.

9. Text Structures. Give students choice in the structure of their essays. We know that the traditional five-paragraph essay doesn't exist in the world outside of school, and in fact, in many of the formal tests administered to students, that standardized structure never even appears, so teach students to take risks with their written structure. Teach students how to organize their thoughts using subheadings, bullets, and numbering. Teach them how to use transitions that not only work between paragraphs, but also work between sections of text. Teach them about captions and integrating quotes. Allow students to embed images and videos into their essays as well as data or textual evidence. Give them choice in the structure of their essay, and you might just find that they can communicate their knowledge more clearly than trying to fit what's in the brain into a structure that doesn't connect with them.

10. Choice of opinion/prompts, etc. Give students options of prompts to respond to and/or create open-ended questions that can only be answered by each individual student. By giving them leeway to decide on their own opinions or choose from a list of content-related prompts, you will find that their excitement for responding increases. And if their engagement increases, you will get the highest level of response they can muster.

11. Seating. Choice of seating was actually mentioned a number of times in our student engagement survey. In my classroom, for instance, I have beanbag chairs, standing desks with bar stools, video game chairs, small group tables, and plenty of carpet. Different kids like to work in different positions. Some like to work under tables or facing walls. I call them "cave dwellers." Others like to stand at the taller tables, dismissing chairs altogether. Others like to sit, back-to-back, on the floor. I also find that they tend to make wise choices. More hyper kids, for instance, will work quantitatively more while rocking in a video game chair than seated static at a desk. The only drawback is that it took me longer to memorize the names because they also liked to try different views of the classroom and different seating options, particularly at the beginning of the year. But (shrug) that was my problem. When we're talking about engagement, it's a no-brainer.

12. Deadlines. You know how you get slammed when all those essays or projects come in all at once? Why not avoid that dilemma and allow students to select the deadlines themselves? Once I have introduced a long-term assignment, I generally open up a window of dates for students to choose from. I send out a Google Form that allows students to select from a drop-down menu of choices. Their selection then seeds a spreadsheet automatically that I can sort by date. The date they select is their firm deadline. So I'm still honoring the assessment of responsibility, but I am also honoring the process of bringing students into the decision-making process.

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What Giving Students Choice Looks Like in the Classroom | KQED

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It can be hard to imagine incorporating student choice into an already hectic classroom. Here are 12 ideas that don't have to mean big dramatic changes.

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Brain Pickings:  The Courage to Be Yourself (a great piece on finding your voice)

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"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. "The true and durable path into and through experience," Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, "involves being true ... to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge."

Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past's contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem - a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.

Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to "trust thyself" have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality more courageously and consistently than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894-September 3, 1962) - an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he "despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it."

A fortnight after the poet's fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, enormous piece by Cummings under the title "A Poet's Advice to Students," radiating expansive wisdom on art, life, and the courage of being yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) - that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as "a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem dispraising dogmata, and several selections from unfinished plays," and which gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist.

Addressing those who aspire to be poets - no doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and courageous seers of human truth - Cummings echoes the poet Laura Riding's exquisite letters to an eight-year-old girl about being oneself and writes:

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Cummings should know - just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship - the MacArthur of poetry - Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he adds:

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we're not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world - unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

Complement the thoroughly invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a lovely illustrated celebration of Cummings's creative bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it really means to find yourself and Janis Joplin on the courage of being what you find.

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

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"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. "The true and durable path into and through experience," Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, "involves being true ...

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Ted Hughes:  Tales from Ovid.  (Hughes's poems are lively, immediate adaptations of Ovid's work, and they are far more accessible than Mandelbaum for high school students.)

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Three years ago, 40 or so leading poets writing in English turned their hands to passages from Ovid in an impressive collective effort, ''After Ovid: New Metamorphoses.'' Hughes, England's poet laureate, was prominent among them, contributing four long poems. He has included them and a score of others in ''Tales From Ovid,'' translating freely and intelligently into idiomatic free verse, in stanzas of varying length.

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Danielle S. Allen:  Our Declaration (Her analysis of form and function of the document itself and its language in what she describes as democratic writing is both readable and immediate.  Her chapter on memos helped students understand the function of the document in its time.)

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Credit Credit Photograph by Duncan Walker/iStock - 360 via Getty Images

"I have never had a feeling politically," Abraham Lincoln declared in Philadelphia on his way to the White House, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." This statement cut to the core of Lincoln's deepest reflections on politics and philosophy. The question is, what precisely are the "sentiments" embedded in the Declaration? This is an issue with which some of our best historical minds - Carl Becker, Garry Wills, Pauline Maier - have grappled.

Now Danielle Allen, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, has added her voice to the mix. Allen has written a line-by-line, frequently word-by-word, commentary on the Declaration, not excluding the placement of commas and semicolons. The book was occasioned by her experience teaching the Declaration to night school students in Chicago. Just how do you make Jefferson's sonorous prose speak to today's students, many of whom are holding down jobs and managing day care? Allen writes movingly about growing up in a mixed-race African-American family whose dinner conversations often turned to the Declaration and its claim that "all men" are created equal.

"Our Declaration" sets forth a bold thesis. American society frequently sees the claims of liberty and equality as pulling in opposite directions; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Furthermore, in the battle between liberty and equality, the claims of individual liberty have generally trumped those of equality. Allen says this is a false dilemma. Liberty and equality are not parts of a zero-sum game, but two mutually supportive aspects of a common democratic culture. It seems hardly fortuitous that a book arguing for the centrality of equality should appear at just the moment when we have discovered the effects of inequality in our public life.

Equality, Allen argues, consists of two parts. The first is an assertion about "freedom from domination." The Declaration's opening sentence affirms the colonists' right to a "separate and equal station" among the powers of the earth, suggesting the idea that no nation has the right to interfere with another's ability to control its collective destiny. In a revealing chapter she shows how this phrase was subsequently undermined by Southern segregationists' arguments for "separate but equal" arrangements and accommodations. Separate and equal implies mutual respect and reciprocity; separate but equal, hierarchy and domination. To paraphrase the great Dinah Washington, what a difference a word makes!

But equality is about more than noninterference; it is also about the creation of a common democratic culture. This goes far beyond the standard reading of the Declaration as a defense of the right not to be interfered with. The Declaration's assertion of "certain unalienable rights," among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, suggests that we are each the best judge of our own interests and consequently equally capable of participating in a shared political life. "Happiness" here does not mean whatever gives us individual pleasure, but contains a social and collective dimension. The core of this idea is equal access to the levers of political power. "As judges of our own happiness, we are equals," Allen writes. "This gem of an idea is the prize of our quest."

This book makes three large claims about the Declaration of Independence, one that is profoundly true, another that is debatable, and a third, I would say, that is false. Its principal truth is that when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," this genuinely meant to apply to all, black as well as white. There is a moral cosmopolitanism in the Declaration's language. This universality was provocatively confirmed by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. In his "Cornerstone Address" of 1861, Stephens alleged that the Declaration did in fact intend to apply to all races, which is why it was necessary for the Confederacy to break from the Union and create its own republic explicitly based upon the principle of white supremacy. It is one of the delicious ironies of intellectual history that those today who claim Jefferson could not possibly have included African-Americans in his assertion of human equality are unwittingly repeating the canards of Confederate propaganda.

Second, Allen devotes considerable attention to the famous "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" clause. How much does the Declaration depend on a theistic orientation? Jefferson and his colleagues speak of rights as being endowed by our Creator. An endowment suggests that these rights are not self-created but a gift. Yet as Allen correctly notes, the God invoked by the Declaration is certainly not the God of the Bible, and may not even be the God of Christianity. So what work does the reference to the laws of nature perform in the text? Here is where matters get tricky. Allen seems to argue, without exactly saying, that the language of divinity is entirely marginal to the text.

In fact, she says, the Declaration's language of "self-evident" truths is drawn not from Scripture but from logic. A self-evident truth is a truth like those found in Euclid, based on language and reason alone. But the question is whether rights claims are like the Pythagorean theorem. Do we understand human equality in the way we can grasp the properties of a triangle? "Can people," Allen asks, "without believing in a god, achieve for themselves maximally strong commitments to the right of other people?" Without answering her own question, she confidently affirms that one does not need to be a theist to accept the arguments of the Declaration. It is not at all clear that this confidence was shared by the authors of the text.

Allen's least plausible assertion is her claim about the "group writing" that went into the composition of the Declaration. She notes that the Declaration was a memo drafted by a committee and argues that group writing "heads the ranks of human achievement," even above works of "individual genius." Really? Group writing, she says, shows how something called the "collective mind" contributes to the production of our shared moral vocabulary. But this claim must be false even in Allen's own terms. Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration contained a powerful denunciation of the slave trade as a "war against human nature." This passage was deleted by the Continental Congress as too inflammatory to be included in the final version. Jefferson's relationship to slavery was, as Allen observes, "maddeningly complex," but had his words not been compromised by the group, they would have rendered impossible later misrepresentations of the Declaration as expressing the economic self-interest of the slave owners.

Whose Declaration is being described here - Jefferson's, Allen's or, as the title suggests, that of our collectivity as a people? Allen's passion for each of the Declaration's 1,337 words is admirable. Yet when she writes that its equality clause stands at the foundation of an "egalitarian cultivation of collective intelligence" and a "co-ownership of a shared world," her analysis veers away from careful reading into the domain of wishful thinking. It is one thing to restore the Declaration's equality clause to its pride of place, but quite another to suggest that it advocates the theory of equality applied to the human mind. Allen's case for a more robustly egalitarian Declaration makes her book timely, but that doesn't make it true.

OUR DECLARATION

A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

By Danielle Allen

Illustrated. 315 pp. Liveright Publishing. $27.95.

Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles professor of political science at Yale and the author, most recently, of "Political Philosophy."

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"I have never had a feeling politically," Abraham Lincoln declared in Philadelphia on his way to the White House, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." This statement cut to the core of Lincoln's deepest reflections on politics and philosophy.

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Linda Rief:  Then Quickwrite Handbook (a resource for helping students engage both reading and writing authentically and with their own voices)

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100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing

In The Quickwrite Handbook, master teacher Linda Rief shares 100 compelling mentor texts and shows how to use each one as a powerful tool for sparking successful writing.

"Quickwrites-writing to find writing-are a powerful teaching tool that help students find ideas, discover their voices, and build their confidence as they discover they have important things to say."

Helping students put words on a page can be hard enough. "I don't have anything to write about!" they say. And when writing does happen, how do you help them develop these ideas into more effective pieces?

A powerful tool to jumpstart writing

In The Quickwrite Handbook, master teacher Linda Rief shares 100 compelling mentor texts and shows how to use each one as a powerful tool for sparking successful writing. Each mentor text includes "Try this" suggestions for inviting students to get started. You'll also find "Interludes" woven throughout: examples of quickwrites that students crafted into more fully developed pieces.

These mentor texts are curated in four categories:

Seeing Inward: How do students view themselves?

Leaning Outward: What do students consider when they step outside of themselves?

Beyond Self: What do students notice and wonder about the world at large?

Looking Back: How does reflection help students grow into more articulate, thoughtful citizens of the world?

Quickwrites go beyond writing prompts

The pages of this book champion Linda's wise words: "Quickwrites-writing to find writing-are a powerful teaching tool that help students find ideas, discover their voices, and build their confidence as they discover they have important things to say."
Quickwrites are more than a set of formulaic prompts. They are opportunities for students to use another writer's words to stimulate their thinking and-through writing themselves-to discover a voice they didn't know they had.

(click any section below to continue reading)

Reviews

"This book will move your writing, your student writers, and your teaching to new places."

-Sara K. Ahmed, author of Being the Change and coauthor of Upstanders
"Linda Rief models the essential moves a teacher must make to increase engagement and joy in writing in The Quickwrite Handbook. You simply must have this book."
-Penny Kittle, English teacher, coauthor of 180 Days and author of Book Love
"In this valuable resource, Linda Rief shares the models from literature that inspire her students and exactly how she uses them. The mentor texts in this book are jumping-off places. They build vision for what strong writing looks and feels and tastes like. They provide the necessary scaffolding that will allow young writers to outgrow themselves and create something they (and we) can be proud of."
-Ralph Fletcher, author of Joy Write and coauthor of Writing Workshop
"Linda offers each of us a clear and concise guide to understanding why quickwrites work and how to give them power in our daily practice."
-Lester Laminack, coauthor of Writers ARE Readers and Bullying Hurts

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In The Quickwrite Handbook, master teacher Linda Rief shares 100 compelling mentor texts and shows how to use each one as a powerful tool for sparking