This is a new civil year, although for those of us in public schools it is probably not quite halfway through the school year - our semester ends a week from next Friday.  I have already made the transition to writing 2012 or /12 rather than the repeated 1s of the previous year.  With nine days left in the semester, most student grades are pretty well determined, although each student will have at least two more assessments.  I have a stack of Advanced Placement papers, and Friday they will sit for a county mid-term.  My regular classes have a quiz on the current material before we pivot and do a brief review for the school-wide midterm, also on Friday.  

Shortly before we returned on Tuesday I sat down and wrote an individual note to each of my 170+ students.  In some cases it was encouragement, in others thanks, in still others chastisement and in almost all cases a bit of a challenge.  I shared what I perceived about each.  As I handed them the slips of paper on which I had type the words I wanted to share with them, I watched their reactions.  Some exchanged papers with classmates.  A few later acknowledged the accurateness of my perceptions.   One asked for an interpretation, which when I offered she nodded her head.  

My perceptions may not be accurate.  If so, then the student has an opportunity to speak with me and clarify.  My responsibility is to let each student know what I am perceiving, so that s/he perhaps understand why I act and speak as I do.  

This is preface.

Right now I am wrestling as seriously as I ever have over whether I will continue in the classroom next year.   I do this in a context of understanding that I have other opportunities I can explore, from free graduate school towards focusing on writing, towards working to improve society but not explicitly addressing education.

In evaluating and exploring, I am discovering that i must consider overlapping and sometimes conflicting senses of responsibility.  

I am selfish.  It is important to me, for my own sense of self, to feel that what I am doing is of value to others.   It is in large part why I teach.  It is also in large part why I write.

My teaching does not seem to be as effective as in previous years.  I am having a harder time finding ways of connecting with my students.   I have to change much more, because they are arriving with very different experiences, skills, knowledge.  Their interests and involvement with civic life is very different even than their older friends and siblings from the last two years.  

They are many.   I am one.   I cannot serve as their teacher by imposing what I may think is right.  I have to first meet them where they are.

I step back.  Remember that column by Charles Blow?  What does it say about our society that we are again seeing at a national level a willingness to use racially-coded messages, designed to paint people of color as "other" in the attempt to achieve political office and power?  How is that part of the context in which I am having difficulty connecting with so many of my young people?

I do not yet have a complete answer.  

The number of my students willing to say anything positive about the Republican candidates after listening to them remains surprisingly small.  Even some who are personally, religiously and politically very conservative get turned off by the rhetoric they hear, perhaps because despite their own personal conservatism and messages they may hear from the pulpit or at the dining room table, they also engage regularly with people who are the targets of such racism and homophobia as spills from the mouths of supposed national political figures.  Some are just becoming turned off to the political process.  Which makes my job as a teacher of government and politics much more difficult.

Many here have written about how ordinary folks are manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the latter.  We often converse about how many people seem drawn - if not outright manipulated - to vote against their own best interests, economically and in other domains.   Franks addresses the mechanisms of how this happens.  We here understand very well the impact of Citizens United, of the increasing influence of moneyed interests on so many areas of our lives.  As one involved in education, I cannot escape from the impact of the wealthy and the corporate interests on what happens in our public schools.  Part of the difference in the students now arriving is how much their educational experience before high school has been narrowed by educational policies driven by wealth and power, pushed by people who at best do not have sufficient understanding of the nature of education or of the impact of the policies they push, or at worst what is too often the case - who are cynical and seek to use education to profit directly from its expenditures or eventually through creation of a compliant low-wage work force that lacks the ability or the power to challenge their control of economics and government and law.  

As has occurred from time to time in my life, I have been recently wrestling with clinical depression.  It is in part because I am at a crossroads in my life, and as of now am now quite sure how I can proceed.  It is in part because I feel frustrated, blocked in making the kinds of difference both in the classroom and in society that can make me feel as if what I do matters.  It is in part because at times I look at what has been happening in the past few years and I come close to despair, not on my own behalf at least as far creature comforts and the ability to survive, but because I cannot remain oblivious to the increase in suffering and pain around me, across the nation.

I find it increasingly difficult to complete tasks to which I had agreed, for example, reviewing the Franks book.  I wonder what difference anything  I do makes.  And if it does not make a difference, why bother?  I become tempted to come home from another school day and rather than reflect upon what worked, what didn't, and what I can do to fix the latter, immerse myself in mindlessness - reading every email even the spam, watching a rerun of Criminal Minds that I have already  seen several times.  

As I explore alternatives to remaining in the classroom, I have to wonder.

What if I get admitted to a free 3-year doctoral program, which provides enough support so that I do not have to worry about my financial future.  Is that a way of disengaging while ostensibly becoming more empowered both in knowledge and in connections?  Is that selfish?  Am I wasting time in the midst of a crisis, so that by the time I become empowered too much damage will already have been done?

What if I could succeed in getting a fellowship that would allow me to do a series of magazine articles or perhaps a book.  That would allow me to produce something more quickly, but in the meantime, what about the students I would not be teaching?  What about the politicians I should be challenging or those I should be supporting?  Might it be more productive to try to change the makeup of those in government?  Is it arrogant to think I could make a difference perhaps by being on the inside, in politics or in government?

If I see that i hold dear being destroyed, crushed, I will not be able to avoid feeling myself crushed.  I understand that.  Which is worse, seeing it coming and not throwing myself in because a major part of me believes it is now pretty hopeless, or going all in and possibly still getting crushed, then feeling at the end as if all my efforts have been useless, that perhaps my life really does not matter.

I did note above I am wrestling with clinical depression.  The words you have just read are written from within that contest and that context.  They are the frame someone depressed uses.   It is one that can quickly become a downward spiral.  

I step away from that vortex, at least momentarily.

I stop and look around.  My wife has just departed for time with her family, starting with the funeral of a woman who was close to her family, who is the godmother of one of her siblings.   My only company in the house is the five felines. I watch as they wander around, eating, playing, perhaps interacting with me.   I realize that I can turn on a radio and listen - really listen - to music.  I can choose to engage - really engage - with a challenging book.   I can turn back towards my students and read and correct their papers.   I can work on an application for that fellowship that would subsidize my writing.  I can take a long walk.  I can go to a movie.  I can do some of the tasks that can be done mindlessly but do them will full attention - clean the cat pans, do the laundry, organize and record paperwork from last year in preparation for doing taxes.  I can do something totally mindless - turn on the tv.  

I am able to make choices.   I may not be able to predict the final result - or even the near-term impact - of any single choice or of the choices in combination.   But I still can choose.  I still have some ability to control aspects of my life.  

Recognizing that, I may not yet have escaped the arena where I have been wrestling with clinical depression, but my world is not now restricted to that arena.  

It may be something as simple as a cat demanding to be fed.  She cannot open the can, and confined to the house she cannot hunt for her own nutrition.   To stop what I am doing to address her needs interrupts the wrestling, gives me an opportunity to reconnect.

I have papers from 125 of my 129 AP students.   I will, I have decided, read them twice.  The first time I will read without judgment - as to grammar, or quality, I will make no marks or corrections.   I want to simply connect with their attempts to think, to express.   The assignment was simple -  at what would you look when deciding whom to support for president?  Think of how you would decide in a primary.  Think of how you would decide in a general.  This is not how I think they should decide, it asks them to connect themselves with what they are studying.  I owe them an openness of mind, so that this becomes an assignment that is about more than learning how to write or to express.

I think the same applies to my civic and political involvement.  I think I have a responsibility I have not been fulfilling, to listen with more of an openness, to try to hear not just what is expressed but what is behind what is expressed.

My wife suggested this morning, during a conversation in which I was exploring the possibility of applying for the writing fellowship, that my writing is very sui generis.  This is in part because I cannot detach myself from what I write.  I can only write through a perspective, and that perspective is my own experience, life, feelings, knowledge.  So long as I recognize the limitations of my own perspective, and allow for what I encounter to change that perspective, I see nothing wrong with that.  Recognizing my own perspective empowers me to recognize the perspectives of others, and to begin to perceive as they might perceive.  Part of my task as a teacher is to similarly empower my students.   Part of my task as a writer is to challenge my readers not merely to accept my perspective, but to recognize their own, to begin to understand that our reactions and expression are shaped in a way that may not immediately connect with others.

One task at which many of us as individuals and we as a society need to work with much more attention -  recognizing how limited our own expressions and perceptions are if we are not open to learning to hear with ears of another, to see with eyes of another, to feel with the heart and soul of another.

We can and must learn how to analyze dispassionately, that is, to see facts as they are, rather than only accepting as "fact" those things that support us in our preconceptions, our political philosophy, our personal theology.   If those 'facts' make us uncomfortable because they challenge us, good.   That is, good, providing we are willing to be good scientific thinkers and use that as an occasion to rethink, or even reexperience, our own perspectives.

Absent such willingness, how is political change possible except by imposition through force?

I am not of the belief that you can win their hearts and minds so long as you have them by the testicles.  In fact, I am not sure I believe in the notion of winning hearts and minds.  I think one can challenge, one can invite, but the meaningful change comes because a person does so with intention.  

It is a Saturday morning.  I began with sufficient sense of depression and despair that i was not sure how I would get through the day.

I am still not happy.  I still confront the reality of my own emotions.  I still must connect rational recognition with action, with a realization that transcends the limits of my rational capacity.

I know this about myself.  I am far less rational than I am intuitive and emotional, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  For my heart and soul are not subject to the limitations of my mind.  

This morning, because I was sharing it with someone with whom I am in dialog about one of the possibilites before me, I reread Healing the Heart of Democracy, my "review" of the book of the same title by Parker Palmer.    One of the quotes from the book which appeared in that piece was this

At the highest levels of institutional politics, the common good is rarely served if citizens are not speaking and acting in their local venues, gathering the collective power necessary to support the best and resist the worst of our leaders as they decide on matters that affect us all.

We begin to connect at the personal level.  Even if we are involved in national politics, that can make our connection simultaneously local.

The subtitle of that book is The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.  The origin of the word Courage is the French word Coeur, which means heart.  I wrote near the end of that piece

Politics involves conflict.  But conflict does not have to result in warfare, physical or metaphorical.  It takes courage to go beyond what one knows and believes and engage in the actions necessary to maintaining and sustaining a real democracy.   It takes an open heart, one which may experience the process of being shattered again and again, yet cannot lose hope.

Remember that the subtitle of the book is our need for courage - a word derived from heart - the courage "to create a politics" - something that is not a given, but one to which we must give human effort - worthy of the human spirit - something that enables all of us to have the opportunity to flourish.

something that enables all of us to have the opportunity to flourish -  I have decided now to use these words as the title of this post.

This is a personal reflection.

I started it from within the aforementioned vortex of clinical depression.

I worried about despair, about not being able to do anything that made a difference.

I struggled with my sense of being not as effective a teacher as i wanted.

I still face those struggles, but I am now able to somewhat refocus my vision.  

I do not yet know what path I will choose to follow for next year.

I do understand this much. . .

throughout the miasma that can come with depression, where one does not think clearly . . .

in the midst of a time of political confusion . . .

when I can still be shocked that some would, as Blow writes, return to what is clearly an appeal to racial division. . .

with full understanding of Franks clear writing on how many of  the rich and powerful seek to manipulate politics and policy to make themselves even more rich and powerful . . .

when I remain unsure of what I may be doing after the end of the school year . . .

I know that it must be  something that enables all of us to have the opportunity to flourish.

All of us.

I know that I cannot flourish in any other way.

I know that my well-being is contingent upon my being connected with others, with caring for others, with doing for others.

I care about my own well-being.  It is my selfish interest.

It must be something that enables all of us to have the opportunity to flourish.

Peace