"I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving."  This is the first sentence of the first chapter of Michelle Obama's Becoming.  I love it.  I think the first couple chapters of her experiences in kindergarten and early elementary would be so interesting for pre-service teachers.  

I also like the ways she describes the way she learns "college knowledge" and resilience.
I was learning all the time now...in the obvious academic ways, holding my own in classes...how to write efficiently, how to think critically.  I'd inadvertently signed up for a 300-level theology class as a freshman and l floundered my way through, ultimately salvaging my grade with an eleventh-hour, leave-it-all-on-the-field effort on the final paper.  It wasn't pretty, but I found it encouraging in the end, proof that I could work my way out of just about any hole. (78)

Later, she encourages students to plan ahead, start way ahead of deadlines.  Of course, the autobiography is an amazing inside perspective on campaigning, on being an ambassador as First Lady, on living on the South Side and on being a devoted mom while working for nonprofits.  I've imagined talking with Michelle Obama in my living room, and now at least I got to hear her voice and story in my living room!

I like stories about science.  I’ve enjoyed biographies about Copernicus and Einstein.  Recently, I’ve liked reading about 19^th century female scholars in science in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things about a character who studies mosses and corresponds with Darwin and Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered about a real biologist who corresponded with Darwin. 

In Kingsolver’s novel there is a character who is a science teacher—Thatcher Greenwood.  Though born in poverty without a mother and an alcoholic, abusive father, he helps doctors in the Civil War and one of them sends him to Harvard afterwards.  He ends up leaving Boston to a small town that is run by “moralists.”  He wants to take his students—mostly girls—into the fields and woods for data collection but is not allowed to.  He shares the history of science, introducing Darwin’s “descent with modification.”  Eventually, he is forced to speak at a public debate called “Darwin vs. Decency.”  The local media is all over it.  Though he carefully and patiently debates the principal, he loses and eventually loses his job.

Dana Goldstein starts The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession with the claim that public school teaching has become the most scrutinized profession.  I think it is good for us to remember the very old debates about “content” and also about “pedagogy.”  So courageous.

Here’s a couple of great lines:

“Thatcher himself in daily contest with the baby Jesus as he tried to hold their attention to the so-called imponderables of physics:  light, heat, magnetism, conservation of energy.  He was losing, to the more ponderable Virgin birth.  His fellow teachers advised against trying.”  (254-255)

Time

It is time to dust off this blog.  The grieving has gone on long enough.   Time has gone so fast.  It is November, so it is overcast.  Here is the beginning of Moby Dick. I share it with students to help them know some complex sentences, some parallel structure.  Now is the time that students feel overwhelmed and gloomy.  I hope they might feel connected to others.  For the first time, however, I felt uneasy about the final line.  My "sea," Lake Michigan, feels a long way off, so my substitute is pen and paper, and I hope that along with paint, brushes, crayons, keyboarding, strumming...it is others' substitute as well.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

                                                      Ishmael, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

                                                          a nest made out of this and that