Summer Reading/Viewing/Listening

Not in the spirit of disconnect or the hammock, but out of the urge/need to replenish and invigorate. As we move out of the mindset of crisis management to constructing a sustainable culture, I offer the following eclectic selection (very) as a kind of kindling wood to spark the fire.

Sonia Nieto: Nice Is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color

Mike Schmoker: Results Now. This is good nuts & bolts, meat & potatoes reading as to what is vital and core to teaching and learning

Parker Palmer: A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited

John Dewey: My Pedagogic Creed. Say what you will about his thorny and onerous prose. This piece penned in 1897 is visionary and accessible, and has as much pertinence in the educational arena as any thinker or writer.

Maxine Greene: Wide Awakeness and the Moral Life. Just so we never fall asleep at the wheel. This is an article from 1978 laden with ideals worth having; a preventative to disillusion, burn out demoralization, and anything else that threatens passion and commitment.

Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms.Listen and learn. Words of one of the world’s great advocates of learning, innovation and creativity, sans jargon or eduspeak.

Ken Robinson: Bring on the Learning Revolution

Ken Robinson: How to Escape Educations Death Valley

David Foster Wallace: This is Water. A powerful commencement address delivered at Kenyon College by this most eloquent of writers. Even though it is for a college audience it resonates with our work.

Neil Postman: My Graduation Speech. One of America’s great iconoclastic thinkers and leaders of progressive education.

Pablo Neruda: Ode to Common Things. Yes a dollop of poetry to keep mediocrity away. A work that celebrates the awe and wonder of the mundane. Because most education writing is like an overheated classroom, where no air circulates but the myopic need to control. This takes spoons, dogs, peaches, locks and elevates them to the domain of the resplendent and sacred.

Charles Mingus: Plays Piano. Because everyone needs time beside a still lake at dusk. Better Git it in Your Soul: Rousing celebration of praising ancestors and influences

Eric Dolphy: God Bless the Child. As lyrical and sensual a full of soulfulness as music can be

Billy Holiday: God Bless the Child, Strange Fruit, Two compositions that should be national anthems

Neil Young: Rocking in the Free World. Turn up the volume, roll down the windows, and drive.

Bob Dylan: May You Stay Forever Young. The acoustic and electric version

Appalachian Spring:Early morning, when the sun rises, the birds scat, and the universe is a perennial state of Spring