Results of Ruminations

The school where I teach has a different way of approaching the Language Arts and history cores. We combine them into a single course. It's twice as long, but it covers both curricula and gives me a chance to dive a little deeper into our coursework as a result. There are immense advantages to this, but there are some downsides. One of them is that my Language Arts instruction is, strangely enough, subsumed most of the time. When I was in college, I studied how to be an English teacher, gaining ideas for writing projects, how to read books, and discussing literature in great depth. Those are skills that I leverage now in my current courses, and I think they're some of the best tools I have. But I also designed content around some of the more nitty-gritty stuff, like grammar, different types of creative writing, and poetry. I don't have the opportunity to teach most of my sophomores about that type of "English" stuff nowadays. Proof positive of this deficiency ...

I don't know all of the details, and I also am making some assumptions on his life based upon poetry (always a risky proposition), but it seems as though slam poet Shane Koyczan   lost his mother due to illness, lived with his grandparents ,* and has said goodbye to too many people he knew. But assuming his poetry is autobiographical, I think it's fair to say that he's had a pretty rough life. Yet his stories are filled with hope, his words with wisdom, and his warm voice with a fatigued but familiar friendliness that holds me when I'm lonely and no one else's arms are nearby to shrug into. And it got me thinking about the marvel of what it is to be so connected, and how much I owe to two Canadian grandparents, one from pre-war Austria, who did their best to raise a young man with a darkness in his soul that he wished to exorcise. Their hard work to raise Shane has, indirectly, led to the life of a guy in Utah Valley being improved, helped, and brightened. Thank...