ED 262 Above and Beyond the Call

For twenty years the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding has been active around the world helping people in areas of ethnic, religious and political conflict discover strategies for reconciliation and conflict transformation. During the many years since I founded Karuna Center, I have been a professor at the SIT Graduate Institute (formerly the School for International Training) where I developed and continue to lead two annual CONTACT (Conflict Transformation Across Cultures) Programs. My experience of dharma practice naturally calls up principles of the Buddha’s teaching. In the stories that follow, I give examples of ways that Karuna Center and CONTACT have drawn on fundamental Buddhist principles to support healing: the truth of impermanence, the recognition of interdependence or “interbeing,” and the need for a “beloved community” (Buddhists might call this sangha) as an antidote to the Three Poisons of greed, anger and delusion. These stories take place on three continents.

Standard-Examiner Pastor Frank Schaefer, the accidental activist Standard-Examiner "The kind of sex homosexual people have is perverted," Schaefer remembers his parents saying, echoing the views of the fundamentalist Baptist church the family...

Dismal parental involvement, fights, and low test scores opened the actor's eyes to the tough reality in Philly schools.

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Tony Danza (actor) and Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) have both earned my respect. Why would anyone who has earned both the fame and fortune of either of these guys choose to change direction and spend time as teachers?

After Apple, "The Woz" spent eight years teaching 5th grade as a credentialed volunteer. Danza spent a year teaching high school English (!) in Philadelphia.

It's easy to be proud to claim that either of these guys saw our profession as a nobler endeavor than their previous well-rewarded work. Those of us who have dedicated our careers to the noblest profession of all know the rewards that money just can not buy.

And, we know the challenges that result when large segments of society would rather turn responsibilty for the success of  their children's educations completely over to us assuming that we ought to some sort of magic wand or if not, are incompetent, too often finding it easier to use teachers, their unions, and "our long vacations & short work days" as easy out scapegoats.

This article introduces Danza's book, "I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had." (reminder: Scoopit free version does not allow for either italics or Bold or underline so I'm kind of stuck for how to enter book titles)

In his one-year experience he may not have picked up as many of the tricks of the trade as a few more years might have brought him, but he learns enough to discover a bit more about the flip side of the story from the basic schools are failing us media focus.

I'm glad he did it. I'm glad he spent a year not only giving but learning more about the challenges. I'm glad he wrote his book. I'm glad he wrote an op-ed and I'm glad he chose USA Today to publish the op-ed even though USA Today is one of my least favorite "newspapers." It's extremely light-weight for the most part leaning more towards the People magazine crowd. But, it has national distribution and reaches more of the very audience that needs to hear someone they like tell them a thing or two about how misguided much of the criticism of schools is. 

When educators attempt to share this information they are almost automatically assumed to be biased merely attempting to shift due blame away from themselves, at least by the segment of society that is loud about complaining and frugal with both time and money about trying to help.

For this reason I was quite disappointed in reading "What Tony Danza Learned From Teaching" by Liana Heitin in Education Week Teacher (http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/08/tony_danzas_teaching_takeaways.html) 

Danza is complements for discovering the basic challenges that we already know. But, I don't really understand her suggestion that because there ARE teachers who are part of the problem that we shouldn't really "waste our time pointing fingers and assigning blame." Okay, assigning blame, particularly when it excuses our own contribution to troubling issues and only blames without taking that position as a starting point for working towards improving OUR efforts whether we are educators, politicians, parents, journalists or any other outspoken person or group is just whining. 

Whining IS wasting our time pointing fingers ans assigning blame. Evaluating a current situation, identifying elements that can be improved, developing means of addressing those weak spots, and spreading the potential solutions based upon more complete data sets is worthwhile. Danza has not bitten off the entire challenge, but he has addressed a significant and seldom addressed beyond the facutly room weak point.

He has made an effort to better inform himself. He has synthesized his new information in light of his own admittedly weak effort as a student. He has discovered that there are many who are responsible for some of the most talked about "failures" of the education of our children. He has written a book INTENDED FOR THE LAY PEOPLE who express concern for improving our children's education. 

He may not be providing much news for educators, but I'll bet because of his celebrity, his unselfish sacrifice of a year of his high income lifestyle and probably a second year in writing his book, that he may well be more successful at reaching the masses with a message about the elephant in the room of education than we have mangaged to be in our efforts to include the lay persons with only partially informed understandings of the challenges of improving education.

He has potentially pulled the rug of scapegoating out from under the feet of those who would rather whine and complain about the problem thereby excusing themselves from responsibility for being part of the solution.  

Yes as a profession we have lots of work to do to improve the quality of education. But, reaching ALL the stakeholders regarding our understanding of the potential solutions is the key. And, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Danza for being a part of the solution to that part of the problem.

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