Circling for Campus Community

So already, as a mid-1970s Harvard-Radcliffe student, I lived in Quincy House*, and I've been thinking about it a lot since October 7 when events in Israel and Gaza created grave tensions among Harvard students and members of other groups and communities on other college campuses, across the USA, and in Israel and other countries.

 

Of late, the national news hasn't been saying much about what's been happening among students on those tense campuses.

 

From my perspective, Quincy House in my day was a friendly--or at least friendly enough--house, despite the social jockeying and pursuit of individual goals that were bound to be in evidence at a place like Harvard. Many of us who lived there said hello or otherwise acknowledged one another upon coming face-to-face in the courtyard, the elevator in the eight-story "new Quincy," and the dining hall.  

 

More importantly, on those occasions when each of us went alone to the dining hall, we could sit down with people with whom we usually didn't eat--and sometimes didn't know--and expect to be welcomed and included in the conversation. There was a common understanding that the dining hall belonged to all of us.

 

This made Quincy House different from some other Harvard houses. I knew from some friends that there were dining halls where established friendship groups who ate dinner together every night were less inclined to be welcoming of "outsiders." Some people I knew even skipped meals rather than go to their house dining halls alone.

 

Even back then, I had several thoughts about what made Quincy House "different." Most important was the physical design of the house itself, a fenced-in compound containing old and new buildings accessible only through a single gate. Since we all had to pass through that same gate to leave and enter, we regularly came face-to-face with one another--and minimally couldn't avoid knowing one another by sight. In addition, the compound's central courtyard was a common gathering and stopping place that naturally supported breezy conversation on beautiful fall and spring afternoons.

 

There was also the social-cultural reality of Quincy House. Because it was a relatively new house, it hadn't yet developed the reputation for being the house of choice for particular types of students--such as classical musicians, aspiring journalists, varsity athletes, theater people and other artists, political activists--although it had gained attention for its space club and wine cellar. So its residents were relatively diverse in their interests and lifestyles.

 

In addition, it was less apt to be selected by students drawn to the traditional, iconic red-brick-and-wood-paneled Harvard and by those wanting to live where their fathers and other relatives had lived as undergraduates. 

 

Though some assigned to Quincy House would have preferred assignment to those older houses, others chose it because it wasn't the old, traditional Harvard and/or they were not legacy students--which is not to say they felt adequately comfortable, visible, and culturally seen and understood as Quincy House residents. I know for a fact that I experienced Quincy House as friendlier and more comfortable than some of them did.

So why am I writing about this now? Because I'm wondering how we mid-1970s Quincy House residents would have acted and reacted had we been confronted by the events on and after October 7 in Israel, Gaza, and Washington D.C., and on the Harvard campus. Would our House community have fractured and broken down? Would each of us have stopped talking to or even making eye contact with those around us whose views we knew--or suspected--differed from our own--and whose palpable pain was rooted in lived experiences and world views different from our own?

 

In the weeks since October 7, I have been involved in some painfully difficult conversations with some old Harvard friends. I deliberately used the word "painfully" in the preceding sentence because, as the only Jewish participant in one of those conversation groups, I've felt deeply disturbed by**** the fact that many in the group have been most concerned about the Harvard brand and Harvard's reputation as intellectually rigorous--and seemingly unconcerned about the widely reported on-campus expressions of antisemitism and other types of hatred and bias. Antisemitism anywhere concerns me.

 

To the credit of our group, we've agreed not let our robust differences tear us apart. Still, I didn't find it easy to send the email in which I explained that I viewed Harvard first and foremost as a school and wanted Claudine Gay to remain at its helm, so, as someone publicly and transparently continuing to learn and grow, she could lead and support others living and learning at Harvard to navigate this perilous campus, national, and world moment.

 

Over the last weeks, I have continued to worry about the undergraduates, even though their daily experience has ceased to be of interest to the national press. How have the students been managing to live side-by-side, face-to-face, and day-to-day in the company of those

• whom they hate and/or by whom they feel hated, 
• whom they fear and/or in whom their words and actions have created fear, 
• whom they believe deserve annihilation and/or by whom they fear being annihilated, 
• whom they believe not only cannot understand their experiences and those of people like them, but belong to the groups responsible for their feelings, 
• whom they hold responsible for the ongoing violence, injustice, and inhumanity in Israel and Gaza,
  
• whom they no longer feel they know--and/or wonder if they ever knew?
  

That last question may be even more important than any of the others, even though it's personal and emotional. In my experience as an educator, it's always first and foremost about people and relationships. 

 

As I've read articles and listened to cable news, I've heard questions about what is being and should be taught in history and political science courses to help students make sense of this historical moment and prepare them to engage in informed, respectful debate about causes and next steps. But I don't think what's happened on campus is only an intellectual or pedagogical problem.*****

 

Consequently, I've been thinking for weeks that the work of rebuilding safe, respectful community should happen in dormitories and dining halls, the emotional spaces of collegiate life, the places where individuals can't avoid coming face-to-face with the very people who may be angering and frightening them, and by whom they may be feeling betrayed, unseen, stereotyped, or misunderstood.

 

But until this weekend--when I read Rabbi Sharon Brous's The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World******--I had no idea what this might really look like. Now I have an idea for a house-based activity. It would have to be voluntary, and it would no doubt feel strange and even uncomfortable at first, especially for those who are by habit very private about what they feel. Some undergraduates (and Harvard others) might dismiss it as uncool, contrived, silly, unintellectual, and/or suspect because of its religious roots, while those willing to participate would likely feel vulnerable doing so--but also curious, courageous, and hopeful.

 

One of Brous's major inspirations is an ancient Jewish text in the Mishna that describes a rite performed on the Temple Mount during a pilgrimage holiday. As Brous explains, summarizing the text, 

    "The crowd would enter the [Temple Mount] Courtyard in a mass of humanity, turning to the right and circling--counterclockwise--around the enormous complex, exiting close to where they had entered.

    "But someone suffering, . . . --someone to whom something awful had happened--that person would walk through the same entrance and circle in the opposite direction [thus, to the left]. . . . And everyone who passed the brokenhearted would stop and ask, 'What happened to you?' . . . 

    "And [after hearing the answer] those who walked from right to left--each one of them--would look into the eyes of the ill, the bereft, and the bereaved. 'May God comfort you,' they would say, one by one. 'May you be wrapped in the embrace of the community.' (3-4)

Two pages later, Brous modernizes and secularizes the ritual:

  

. . . There's a stranger coming toward you, making her way against the flow of the crowd. . . . She is clearly suffering. . . . You stop and greet her with a simple, open-hearted question: 'What's your story? Why does your heart ache?'

    And this grief-stricken person answers: 'I am broken.'

    You offer words of comfort. 'I see you,' you say. 'You are not alone.'

    You continue to walk, until the next distressed person approaches.(5)

Brous then goes on to comment on why this ritual heals, or at least potentially begins a healing process.

    There is a timeless wisdom in entering the sacred circle: this is, on some fundamental level, what it means to be human. Today, you walk from left to right. Tomorrow it will be me. I hold you now, knowing that eventually, you'll hold me. Every gesture of recognition marries love and humility, vulnerability and sacred responsibility.

    . . . This ancient . . . ritual . . . has taught me the transformative nature of showing up when we want to retreat, of listening deeply to each other's pain even when we fear there are no words. Of . . . recognizing that even though we can't heal each others, we can and we must see each other. (5-6)

It was the reference to courtyards in the Mishna text that got me thinking that a variation of this ritual could be enacted at the Harvard houses. Harvard houses have courtyards, courtyards have perimeters, and the common entrances into those courtyards could serve as the entering and leaving points for those walking those perimeters. Furthermore, Harvard houses have common spaces that could be good post-circling gathering places for those wanting to continue engaging with one another after the activity.*******

 

I would change the script for the campus activity--and make it available to all students prior to the actual circling, which I would advise happen once a week for 4-5 consecutive weeks, allowing--and encouraging--all to participate at least once and ideally multiple times. I would also suggest this in recognition of the fact  that some people wait to see how such activities go for the first round of participants before giving them a try themselves.

My suggestions for the ritualized responses would be as follows.

• A person circling to the right, upon encountering a person circling to the left would say, "Hello. Why are you in distress?"
• The person circling to the left would say, "I have been feeling ______." Any number of adjectives could go into this blank--"sad," "misunderstood," "enraged," "fearful," "confused," "distrustful," "alienated," "endangered," "betrayed," "abandoned," "ostracized," "frustrated," "outnumbered," "stereotyped," "hated," "hopeless," and "concerned" are some possibilities. And students could share as many adjectives as they pleased.
  
• The person circling to the right would then say, "Thank you for telling me. I see you and hear you."

That's all. No one would be expected to say anything else; in fact all would be directed to say nothing else during the activity. But all would be expected to participate in good faith or at least in open-hearted curiosity.

 

My inspiration for adding the hello at the beginning of the exchange was Maya Angelou's optimistic inaugural poem "On the Pulse of Morning," in particular its final stanza:

Here, on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister's eyes, and into

Your brother's face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope--

Good morning. 

Immediately following the circling activity, anyone wanting to reflect on the experience of participating in it would be invited to gather for a conversation facilitated by a member of the House staff. Guiding questions might be 

• How did it feel to participate?
• What, if anything, surprised you about the experience?
  
• Would you participate again?
• What, if anything, did you learn--about yourself? about our House? about others? about structured activities like this one?  

Refreshments would be a must at this further conversation!

I wonder if there's any chance that Faculty Deans (called housemasters in my day) at Quincy House or other Harvard houses would consider giving this idea a try. My own feeling is that circling the courtyard or the dining hall would be far healthier for a fractured community than circling the wagons. But then again, as a longtime teacher in a public democratic alternative school with lots of experience making groups work in schools and classrooms (thank you, Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), I trust in structured activities that protect all participants while making their voices heard and their faces seen. Healing and community-building take time and work, but that work needs to start somewhere.

* Screen shot of an online photograph by Jeff Soongs or Jeff Songs--can no longer find it, but will keep trying.

**Screen shot of one of the header photos on the following website: Harvard Univerity. (n.d.) Quincy House. https://quincy.harvard.edu/

***Screen shot of one of the header photos on the following website: Harvard Univerity. (n.d.) Eliot House. https://eliot.harvard.edu/

**** "Blue Self," a painting by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/post/110473758402/259-blue-self-2015-42-x-34-oil-on-denril

*****Screen shot of a photo on blog, filtered by me: Mitchell, M. (2016, September 22). Collaborative circle mural. This little class or mine. https://thislittleclassofmine.weebly.com/home/collaborative-circle-mural (The original unfiltered photo is pictured next to these endnotes.

*(6) Brous, S. (2024). The amen effect: Ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world. Penguin Random House. 

*(7) I now have some thoughts about what might happen next, but they are for a further blog post.

Still Reading James Baldwin

So already, as you may know from my last blog post, I've been reading James Baldwin. As I was writing that post and thinking about what Baldwin's impact is on Americans and what I think it should be, I recalled that in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, there's a quotation from Baldwin high on the wall of its ascending multi-leveled history section.

That quotation appears below, highlighted and presented in the context of the paragraph in which it appears in his essay entitled "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes":

For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.**

 

At the conclusion of my last post, I included a link to "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes" and recommended it to those who hadn't read it. In so many ways, its wisdom and memory can help us understand--and address--our present-day situation: here we are in 2023 still grappling as a nation with the "questions" of what history is true and whether African Americans will have the same rights and privileges as white Americans. 

 

The essay, which seems so current, first appeared in The White Problem in America, a special edition of Ebony published in 1965 and published in 1966 in book form.

Since then, I've reread it and decided that it's too important, too thought-provoking, too useful in our present moment not to feature it. So in this blog, I am going to share some quotations that I think can speak importantly to a lot of readers, particularly to white readers. Perhaps some will be inspired to read the whole essay.

First, here's the opening paragraph in which Baldwin speaks about what he's often wondered about:

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED, AND IT IS NOT A PLEASANT wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another. I wonder this because they do not, after all, seem to find very much to say to me, and I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they appear to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that, in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely.

The idea of reassurance that requires the obfuscation of reality seems especially worth considering seriously. Experiences of shame often induce people to change or veil the facts, never a sound long-term solution for nations or individual people.

 

A bit later, he lays out the possible inner struggles and debates of white people confronting  their dawning comprehension that the history they've embraced is at least partially inaccurate and self-serving:

This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America. The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I, also, despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties; and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing. What have you got against me? What do you want? 

 

But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much. 

I've heard people say the things that Baldwin imagines them saying. In addition, I'm glad that Baldwin identifies pride as a factor in the resistance to the truth of history: a group's or family's dearly-held stories of achievement often become defining legends, though they seldom reflect only the efforts, actions, and characters of their members; histories are made and told in contexts.

 

I loved Baldwin's story a little later in the essay about marching to the Montgomery, Alabama Capitol in the company of Harry Belafonte, creating a need for angry, disapproving young white women to try to reconcile Belafonte the civil rights activist with Belafonte the handsome, popular entertainer.

I was next to Harry Belafonte. From upstairs office windows, white American secretaries were leaning out of windows, jeering and mocking, and using the ancient Roman sentence of death: thumbs down. Then they saw Harry, who is my very dear friend and a beautiful cat***, and who is also, in this most desperately schizophrenic of republics, a major, a reigning matinee idol. One does not need to be a student of Freud to understand what buried forces create a matinee idol, or what he represents to that public which batters down doors to watch him (one need only watch the rise and fall of American politicians. This is a sinister observation. And I mean it very seriously). The secretaries were legally white-it was on that basis that they lived their lives, from this principle that they took, collectively, their values; which is, as I have tried to indicate, an interesting spiritual condition. But they were also young. In that ghastly town, they were certainly lonely. They could only, after all, look forward to an alliance, by and by, with one of the jeering businessmen; their boyfriends could only look forward to becoming one of them. And they were also female, a word, which, in the context of the color curtain, has suffered the same fate as the word, “male” : it has become practically obscene. When the girls saw Harry Belafonte, a collision occurred in them so visible as to be at once hilarious and unutterably sad. At one moment, the thumbs were down, they were barricaded within their skins, at the next moment, those down turned thumbs flew to their mouths, their fingers pointed, their faces changed, and exactly like bobby-soxers, they oohed, and aahed and moaned. God knows what was happening in the minds and hearts of those girls. Perhaps they would like to be free. 

I wonder which the young women wanted more, to love Belafonte or to hate him. I wonder if they talked about it with one another.

Finally, the essay ends by making reference to the Henry James novel, The Ambassadors--and how often do you get to read about Harry Belafonte and Henry James in the same essay?

In Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors published not long before World War I, and not long before his death, he recounts the story of a middle-aged New Englander, assigned by his middle-aged bride-to-be-a widow-the task of rescuing from the flesh-pots of Paris her only son. She wants him to come home to take over the direction of the family factory. In the event, it is the middle-aged New Englander--The Ambassador--who is seduced, not so much by Paris, as by a new and less utilitarian view of life. He counsels the young man to “live. Live all you can. It is a mistake not to.” Which I translate as meaning “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” Jazz musicians know this. Those old men and women who waved and sang and wept as we marched in Montgomery know this. White Americans, in the main, do not know this. They are still trapped in that factory to which, in Henry James’ novel, the son returns. We never know what this factory produces, for James never tells us. He only conveys to us that the factory, at an unbelievable human expense, produces unnameable objects.

I have to wonder about the degree to which many Americans would bristle at the idea of being "trapped in that factory," especially by choice, due to their alleged penchant, according to Baldwin, to opt for profits and goods--"unnameable objects"--even when they could opt for "life" and freedom.

"Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes," with its various generalizations and examples, is bound to elicit a range of strong reactions in white readers--and I hope some of you will share your reactions below. As for my readers who are initially very uncomfortable with Baldwin's thoughts, I hope you will hang in there with this essay, perhaps reread it once or twice before coming to your final conclusions about its truth and its value to us as a society in which liberty and justice are not yet for all. Seeing reality is always the first step toward making the changes we claim we want to see.

* Screenshot of photograph accompanying James Baldwin (2023, June 15). Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Baldwin 

** Baldwin, J. (2016, August 23). Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes. Blackstate. https://blackstate.com/james-baldwin-unnameable-objects-unspeakable-crimes/ [Note: This essay was originally published in The White Problem in America, compiled by the editors of Ebony Magazine, and published by Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago in 1966.]

*** Photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke accompanying New York Review of Books article entitled "‘The Central Event of Our Past’: Still Murky" by Andrew Delbanco, published on February 9, 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/02/09/central-event-our-past-still-murky/

A January Post in the Nick of Time

So already, when I began writing this blog in 2013, I promised myself that I would post something at least monthly. With fewer than ten hours left--actually about four right now--in what has been a strangely beautiful, conveniently ice-free, disarmingly mild January, I am determined to post something by midnight tonight. But it's possible I shouldn't be posting anything right now.

A few days ago, I began writing a post--but to no avail. In it, I included the main reason for my apparent blog neglect: the fact that I've been writing more poems than usual this month--works-in-progress not yet ready to be shared in this blog or elsewhere.

Then I explained what I'd been reading that had been claiming a lot of my time and energy: essays* by Karl Kirchwey--some including poetry--in part about the war-hero uncle for whom he is named; the novel Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, which answered so many questions that the movie "Hidden Figures" had raised for me; and recent poem collections by Sandra Cisneros (Woman Without Shame) and Louise Glück (Winter Recipes from the Collective).

 

Initially, I  thought I'd write a post about how those two poem collections, whose authors, like me, are over the age of sixty-five, had gotten me thinking about the role of senior citizen poets in American society. When the poem "The Layers," written by Stanley Kunitz when he was a senior citizen, serendipitously fell into my lap, courtesy of one of the women in my poetry writing group, I was sure it was a sign I had a good idea.

 

But the insights didn't come, either into the topic or into myself. Yes, it was true that when I shared Kunitz's poem with some of my same-age college classmates, they felt--gratefully, they said--that something they'd been feeling and struggling to express had been put into words to which they could return later. But I wondered if Glück's last lines in "The Denial of Death" better captured the feelings of others of them:

                        . . . I felt

something true had been spoken

and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself

I was glad at least to have heard it (7).**

Why I suspected some of them would feel that way I wasn't sure; nor was I sure what it would mean if they did.

But I also knew that I wasn't going to have much time to think about that because I was going to be spending the weekend ahead at the Bob Moses Conference. Wanting to fill in the big gaps in my understanding of the history and consequences of mass incarceration in America, particularly the incarceration of Black men, I'd signed up for it weeks earlier.

 

The conference did not disappoint; it educated and galvanized. It was especially meaningful--and poignant--to be able to listen to scholars and activists talk about racial criminalization, policing, and punishment on the same weekend that the videotape of Tyre Nichols' brutal beating was released to the public. There were many answers to the question of "How could this happen?"

 

When I left Cambridge late Sunday afternoon, I was awash in new understandings that I wanted to solidify so I could use them. So when I got home, I turned on my computer not to blog, but to buy two books: William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen's From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century and Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

 

Then Monday came, along with its usual obligations, the most important one being going to visit my mother in the Skilled Nursing section of her senior living community. While my mother took a post-breakfast nap, I picked up Winter Recipes from the Collective and began rereading it. Glück's poems, sometimes allegorical, sometimes surreal, sometimes stripped down to their barest essentials, catapulted me into a narrative set at the porous membrane between life and death. While I usually don't live alongside Glück in that existential border town, I have to admit that sometimes Skilled Nursing feels like such a place.

 

What was even stranger, though, was suddenly to be exploring death as an existential inevitability, and an unavoidable source of individual grief and loss, when all weekend long, my fellow conference attendees and I had been exploring it as a social reality, a means of strengthening and perpetuating a society ordered around a white supremacist racial hierarchy, and an unavoidable source of collective grief and loss. 

I wrap up this blog feeling split between--or maybe caught between--these two very different perspectives on and explorations of death. I also end it very much hoping to have something much more "figured out" to say about something next month, now only four hours away. May February be a good month for all of us, a month that offers us clarity and hope.

* These essays appear in recent issues of Agni, Arion, and The American Scholar.

** Glück, L. (2021). Winter recipes from the collective. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hardened Schools and Hardened Hearts

So already, before the massacre at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last Tuesday, mass shootings--and school shootings in particular--were already on my mind.  

 

Six days after a shooter set on killing African-Americans murdered ten people in Buffalo, my husband and I, driving through Connecticut on Route 84 West en route to my cousin's wedding in Pennsylvania, passed the Newtown and Sandy Hook exits. They looked just like any other exits.

 

They reminded me of the first question that came to my mind when I visited High Tech High School* in San Diego early April 2013.

 

High Tech High's physical space--airy, bright, and alive--was designed to support project-based learning and collaboration. Its interior glass walls were intended to make student work--and students working--visible so the whole community might engage with the learning and projects connected to them. Windows and sight lines everywhere!

 

"How the hell do they lock this place down?" I wondered.

 

The minute I voiced that question to myself, I was stunned. I'd been teaching for thirty-four years; even five years earlier, despite Columbine, I didn't think I would have thought to ask that question. But seconds later, my question made sense to me. Since Sandy Hook, I'd become used to practicing lockdown drills with my students, to scoping out possible exits, to checking whether doors had windows, to thinking which objects might successfully shield or hide a student from a shooter.

I was at High Tech High for a conference about deeper learning, and, in fact, I had one of the most meaningful professional learning experiences of my career on the first day of the conference. Project-based learning and place-based learning coincided when a group of us crossed the border into Mexico at Tijuana as pedestrians in order to begin to explore the question of "How does the US-Mexican border impact our community, and how do we impact the border?" 

 

The experience was designed to be "a day long launch into an essential question important to our area." Clearly, High Tech High School, at least in 2013, valued porous, flexible walls between school and community, school and the world. At CRLS too, the world beyond the school building was considered to be a great learning resource, though making use of it required vigilance, deliberateness, and adherence to district policies. Plus it was nice for kids to be able to walk across the street during lunchtime and buy a piece of pizza.

So when I think about Ted Cruz's remarks yesterday at the National Rifle Association convention about "hardening" schools, I get furious from both a learning and emotional perspective. Who wants to send their children to a hardened school, as opposed to a safe one--one that offers emotional as well as physical safety?

 

I've led workshops at schools within walled compounds with entrance gates patrolled by armed security guards, but they've been in other countries. I haven't wanted this to be the American norm; I haven't wanted the neighborhood school to have to separate itself from the neighborhood rather embed itself in its fabric. But I write that knowing that some neighborhoods offer swaths of dangerous fabric, even if school shooters aren't lurking in them.

In Sandy Hook, according to Education Week, the new elementary school has been designed  to be more of a "safe haven" than a "fortress."***** Would that all communities could afford such a school.

What I mostly fear is that the more time, energy, and money goes into hardening schools, the less time, energy, and money will go into educating and caring for the students who attend them. And as the pandemic wears on, our kids need more personal attention, individualized instruction, and emotional support then ever to realize their potentials and move forward with hope. School has to be about much more than keeping them alive.

It takes hardened people to embrace the idea of hardened schools--schools to which they probably wouldn't send their own children.

* Screenshot of google maps image in Trotta, B. (2019, October 7). I-84 Westbound Ramps in Newtown To Be Closed Every Night This Week. The Wolf: Hudson Valley's New Country.
https://danburycountry.com/i-84-westbound-ramps-in-newtown-to-be-closed-all-this-week/

**  Highly regarded High Tech High School was co-founded by two of my former Cambridge Rindge and Latin School colleagues, Rob Riordan and Larry Weinstock, and I was truly excited to finally be visiting it.

*** Screenshot of photo taken by author accompanying Schwartz, K. (2018, February 6). What's So Different About High Tech High Anyway? KQED/Mind/Shift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/50443/whats-so-different-about-high-tech-high-anyway 

**** Screen shot of image accompanying Dreith, B. (2022, May 27) Texas senator proposes design measures to "harden schools" in wake of Uvalde shooting. Dezeen. https://www.dezeen.com/2022/05/27/ted-cruz-one-door-uvalde-school-shooting/ 

***** Screen shot of photo from Robert Benson photography accompanying Klein, A. (2019, March 12). Making School a Safe Haven, Not a Fortress. EducationWeek: Special Report. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/making-school-a-safe-haven-not-a-fortress/2019/03