Recognition from the World Affairs Council

Last night, an organization called the World Affairs Council recognized me with their World Educator 2025 award. They honored me, I think, for much of what is reflected on this blog. Below are my remarks at the event.

              Thank you to the friends and students who have honored me by showing up tonight, to Evangeline for nominating me, and to the World Affairs Council, for being about the kind of connections and community that I am so happy to celebrate in accepting the World Educator award tonight. 

               I want to take this opportunity to speak to what I think we are valuing here together when you’ve recognized my contributions in particular. As a public high school English teacher, my job is to transmit skills, take attendance and answer emails, attend meetings, and pass my students. As long as I do that, I don’t hear from school leadership. But what’s most meaningful to me in our work with children is their sense of self and world, their emotional power to hurt and heal and grow community and understanding.

               I have had the fortune to work with institutions and educators that honor such experiences: The Fulbright Teacher Exchange brought my family to Hungary in a life and culture swap. Hands for a Bridge has built enduring relationships in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Washington state, stepping across difference towards sharpened appreciations of political, historical, and cultural contexts. Margins and Centers, a course that investigates power with an eye towards empowerment, justice, and joy, is built on collaborations guided by one of the wisest, most creative instructors I’ve ever met, Anu Taranath. She exemplifies the kind of open-eyed, open-hearted teaching I most want to embrace.

               What these programs have in common is an understanding that education involves not just the mind but the heart—a hungry curiosity, a generosity of spirit. We can learn skills and pass tests and follow rules; but if we want to learn more than obedience or self-promotion, then we celebrate the communal nature of the classroom; we step outside comfort zones and look beyond schoolhouse walls; we acknowledge and interrogate and honor our emotional reactions to events and ideas outside of us.

               Any time we can elevate students from habituated contexts and ideas, we can do this.

               Consider an afternoon that American students experienced in Cape Town, side-by-side with their Xhosa and Afrikaner friends: We’d read a novel about a fraught moment towards the end of Apartheid when a young American was killed by a mob in the township of Gugulethu. We stood where she was killed, meditating on both the anger of the moment and the truth and reconciliation work that later stared into it and allowed a measure of healing. Our guide grieved the vandalism and decay on the monument before us: important history was either not being taught or not being appreciated. And then we sang, bringing ourselves into a personal mournfulness of the shared experience.

               Later, we would write and talk. The cracked, vandalized monument and Siya’s words made us think about memorials, heroes, shared history when it’s communally remembered: such history and heroes help us understand others and energize around common values. Without these, those most marginalized stay divided; and bigotry is left undisturbed.

               It was the specificity of this moment, this place, these specific cracks, surrounded by these people, wrapped in this song and these ideas, and the unflinching group dialogue that followed, that deepened our thinking about history, our collectivity in it, and above all, our invested feeling in it.

               Again, it’s getting students out of their habitual contexts that accelerates such heart-work. Group travel can do this. Field trips can do it. Eleven p.m. talking circles can do it. But you don’t need to travel across the world or even across the city to do this. Any group experience that students understand as bigger than a classroom and bigger than an assignment for a grade does the same work: We’re already a community—thinking and experiencing, together, in a classroom—and that gets us a lot of the way there. From that collectivity, a learning and cultural encounter that expands a person, both in mind and heart, has the potential for joy and for support from a world outside of our own close needs and interests.

               Tonight, I want to reaffirm what is most joyous, challenging, and human in this work and play of learning, and that’s in the connections and relationships we make to the world beyond the comfort of what we already know and experience. When we step together as communities towards other communities—in reading, in imagination, or in body—we grow, we fortify, we deepen our own humanity. We strengthen our world.

               Thank you.

Bastard Out of Carolina: Why I read a devastating book with young students

               Today my eleventh graders discussed the scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina when a stepfather rapes its twelve-year-old narrator, the mother arriving in time to witness the unthinkable abuse held secret for so long and raging at him before, shockingly, comforting him, choosing him, if only to stop the abject beating of his own bloody face. Student anger is always steepest for the mother, betraying her daughter in the hour of her greatest need in the very moment Anney can finally understand and see her daughter fully.

               How does Anney get so bent that she chooses that man over her daughter? Can daddy issues really account for Glen’s disturbed sexual anger? What will it take for Bone, our young narrator, to heal from the years of abuse and the secrecy that curdles them into self-loathing and shame and bitter wrath, and now, this crushing day of annihilation and abandonment?

              In discussing chapters preceding this one, I don’t foreshadow Anney’s devastating choice of husband over daughter. Instead, I highlight the ferocity of her protectiveness towards her children out in the world, and I also point to the tenderness towards what is so hurt and insecure in her husband. And today, when students express revulsion for Anney and also wonder if she will regret this moment, I return them to the many signals of deep regret even in the moment it’s happening; and, most provocatively, I take them back to one of the dedications of the book, For Mama, a dedication to a book written within two years of Dorothy Allison’s mother’s death. 

              Will Bone ever be able to love her mother after this? Is healing possible? 

              This book, though it ends soon after and Bone stays so hurt, broken, and sour, is its own answer. It is brave and raw and honest, and it finds its way to this moment. To tell so baldly of all the fierce mothering that comes to such betrayal may seem a way to justify a continued and hardened anger. But it may well be the way back to love. There is so much generosity in this book—for the rambunctious uncles, the hard and wise Boatwright aunts, even for Glen, who is made so small by his cruel family, for Anney in all her fighting spirit and confused tenderness, and most of all, for Bone, the narrator herself, the child and author’s child within, blistering in rage and shame, who wants to protect her mother and who leans in to her family’s defiant spirit but also her own creative searching and sporadically tended brokenness. One aunt teaches her witness and honesty. Another teaches her empathy and generosity of spirit. And her mother tries and tries and tries to be a good mother, this woman barely older than Bone when she’s conceived, tries, and in this chapter, deeply fails—but even then, trying, tragically and urgently. Bone will find a way to love her mother again and, above all, love herself, two things that I believe are knit together, and she will do so largely through the empathetic powers of writing, where she can understand, recognize, and see and find the dignity and devotion amid the horrors and betrayals. 

              Last week, a student finished the book early; and she is such a sensitive kid, I saw her open face, looking small. She said it was the hardest book she’s ever read, but she’s glad she read it. I told her, I’ve taught this book so many times and every time it shreds me: it takes so much emotional energy to be in that space with good young people day after day. Then why do you do it? she asked. 

              This book does something for a class that no other book I’ve taught has been able to do. The vulnerability it takes to be in conversation together, but also the generosity of spirit and minutely honest portrayal of pain, shame, and confusion, teach lessons in the power of speaking in healing, the power of witness in healing, the power of community in healing, lessons in our power of understanding that makes monsters into men and evil into humanity however broken; and that humanity in its pain and its expansive power is what allows hurt people to come again to love, and to forgive a self, and to welcome and be good to others. In reading this book together, the humanity possible and the humanity demanded is large. 

              When we read The Bastard Out of Carolina, those of us who see themselves in Bone have a sister and are not so alone, and can externalize the poisons. And when we read it, those who feel compassion for Bone learn how to understand her meanness and love her anyway. And when we read it together, as a group of people suddenly soul-to-soul with the sensitive and yearning hearts of others, exposed to each other because we know what they have just read, give grace to what they might be thinking about or feeling or remembering; and when I talk them through the many jagged ways we love and are loved and need to be seen and fight our way from darkness, we learn the importance of opening our hearts, of witnessing, of asking, of making space for pain—our own and our neighbors’—and of growing the welcome of love.