Wisdom from the Dalai Lama: Can we teach compassion

"In my experience, what we need is a calm mind, and warm-heartedness provides a basis for that. That’s how we make ourselves happy as individuals in families, local communities and nations. I believe that if we can train those who are young today in these qualities, the world will be a more peaceful place later in this century." - Dalai Lama

and

"Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people’s hearts. Modern civilization places great importance on filling the human brain with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human heart with compassion.Compassion is not religious, it is human. It is not a luxury, it is essential for our emotional and mental stability and for human peace and survival."

- Dalai Lama

I just finished reading the Dalai Lama's book "Beyond Religion," where he argues that ethics and compassion transcend all religious/secular beliefs, and that they are in fact the basis  not only to a more humane world but also to individual human happiness. I agree completely with the Dalai Lama. If we can teach our kids to be kind, empathetic, compassionate, and calm, we will be doing the best job possible as parents and teachers. And research increasingly suggests that character can be taught. Here's an older post I wrote: Can Empathy Be Taught, which offers some specific tools for parents and educators to use. 

And here are some fantastic picture books for kids (ages 4 to 8) that teach empathy and compassion. They're my favorites -- artistic masterpieces in every sense of the word! These books will foster deep and thoughtful discussions about kindness, compassion, empathy, and managing our emotions. I can't recommend the books below highly enough. And if you're looking for multicultural literature, this list offers a very diverse selection.

The Last Kappa of Old Japan, by Sunny Seiki 
Silent Lotus, by Jeanne Lee
Grandfather Gandhi, by Arun Gandhi and Bethany Hegedus
Fly Free, by Roseanne Thong
How Full is Your Bucket, by Tom Rath
Kali and the Rat Snake, by Zai Whitaker
Zen Ties, by John J. Muth
Each Kindness, by Jaqueline Wilson

Why Singaporeans love Beyond the Tiger Mom!

Here's a lovely review by June Wan of Singapore Motherhood! To see the complete interview and review, check out the full article in Singapore Motherhood.

Review: Beyond The Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age by Maya Thiagarajan

Singaporean parents, in particular, will love this book. Not just because each chapter concludes with pages of tips and how-tos on topics close to our hearts — how to build a math-rich home, how to help your child memorise information, how to supplement your child’s education are some examples —  but also because author Maya is a parent who is particularly like us.

Like us, she straddles an east-west divide when it comes to parenting. Like us, her heritage is Asian. Like us, she had a Western-based education delivered in English. And most of all, like us, when it comes to parenting, she is sometimes confused about which style to follow – the stricter, more structured, authoritarian, academics-driven Asian style, or the freer, more independent, Western-style with its emphases on positive discipline, creativity, and freedom.

Just as there is no perfect style of parenting, there is no perfect answer. The solution, Maya suggests, lies within the straddle. And here, once again, it is typically Singaporean. Her interviews with parents in Singapore reinforce our ‘uniquelySG’ quirks. “I know I’m a kiasu mum because I feel more anxious than my son does when he takes an exam,” one admits.

The Asian obsession with tuition is accepted with wry acceptance: “One mother estimated that thirty out of the thirty-five students in her son’s class… attended tuition in all their major academic subjects. Her son himself spends all day Saturday at tuition classes.”

As one foot remains firmly planted on Asian soil, Maya encourages us to embrace the western tenets of 21st-Century parenting — to help our children develop a growth mindset, to frame failure as a learning experience — to move along with changes in technology that have made parenting now so different from what we know and how we were brought up.

Perhaps, while waiting for the child’s tuition class to end, mum (or dad) could read this book. You’ll chuckle over parental excesses, probably identify with most of them, devour the parenting and teaching tips at the end of each chapter, find community with parents featured, and come away reassured that your style of east-west parenting — whether you’re a Tiger parent or not — is the right way to raise your little Asian Tiger. — June Wan

Awash in Data: The perils of a data-driven education culture

Where's the data? What kind of data has value? And what are educators in schools doing with all this data?

Here's a great piece from Education Week on the uselessness of tomes of education data.

As a high school teacher, I've been struggling with all the emphasis on data and scores. We keep track of tons of scores -- standardized test scores, predictive scores, mock exam scores -- in a huge excel spreadsheet at school.  My kids complete math drills online, and then get scoresheets that track their performances in a number of different ways. Teachers who use Harkness tables for student run discussions are encouraged to gather data on which students speak and how much they speak. And in the Lab school started by Sal Khan in the US, (which I wrote about here), every conversation becomes an exercise in data gathering.

We educators are awash in a sea of data.

But you know what? I think that all this data collection has little value. And in fact, I think that our emphasis on data can actually be a dangerous thing. And here's why.

Firstly, as the author of the article in Ed Week points out, most of this data doesn't lead to student improvement in any way. In the old-fashioned world of education, teachers would give kids tests or assessments that required the kids to study and work. Then teachers would grade these tests/assessments and offer lots of targeted feedback. Kids would do "corrections," or in the case of an essay, "a revision," to show that they had learnt from their mistakes. While teachers wouldn't be collecting reams of data, they would be engaged in making sure that students learnt from their mistakes. These teacher-developed classroom assessments were all that parents, students, and teachers really needed to ensure that kids were learning.

In today's world, kids take a million tests that have nothing to do with what's going on in the classroom, and schools are constantly trying to mine all kinds of data -- but there's no feedback loop from teacher to student, and there's no emphasis on corrections, revisions, and actual learning. So what's the point?

Secondly, there's something inherently dehumanizing about all this data. The information that I feel matters most to me as a teacher is not stuff that can be captured using numbers and spreadsheets.

It's not numerical data I'm looking for.
What I'm looking for is the look of triumph in a student's eye when she finally makes connections and understands something important.
I'm looking at the child who refuses to meet my eye because he's clearly upset about something.
And I learn a lot from those casual conversations in the hallway, or the off-hand comment a child makes about a book she just read.
I'm looking for the wonderful piece of writing that a child shares with me, where I can see what she's thinking about and how she's working through the writing process.
I'm looking for the feeling of energy in the classroom as kids engage in a heated discussion.

Increasingly, I feel as though technology, testing, and the emphasis on data collection are somehow dehumanizing education.

We're turning a fundamentally human profession based on human relationships into a data gathering exercise where kids become reduced to a series of numbers in an excel spreadsheet. And that scares me.

Book Update!

My book, Beyond the Tiger Mom, will launch in the US on Feb 26th! Right now, it's in bookstores across Singapore, and it will soon also hit bookstores across East Asia. So far, I've gotten some really interesting responses from readers and potential reviewers. The book seems to resonate particularly well with Indian-Americans. Here are a couple of comments I've received:

"I'm thoroughly impressed with the book. I agree - As an Indian American, I can relate to many of the two cultures' inherent tensions. Literature is often biased towards the western standard, and your unbiased reflections are so refreshing! I really appreciated it, and I'm sure many NSF parents and students in the U.S would as well."
- From Srinidhi, the editor of North-South Foundation's magazine. 
The North South Foundation is a fantastic organization in the US that not only provides academic support and coaching for Indian-American kids but also provides scholarships and funding for students in India. It's the organization that coaches Indian kids for the famed US spelling bees and math counts competitions. They are planning to review the book soon.

"The book is very captivating – specially for Indian-American parents who have to make sense of two contradictory approaches."
- From Parthiv Parekh, editor of Khabar magazine.
Khabar is a magazine for the Indian-American community in Atlanta, Georgia. 

I've also had some wonderful responses in Singapore: one mother told me that "the book spoke very strongly to her experiences as an Asian parent with kids in an international school"; another mom emailed me saying that "she couldn't put the book down." These kinds of comments make me feel as though all the thought, effort, research, and time that went into the book are certainly worth it. 

I think it's so important that Asian mothers -- both in Asia and in the West -- have a book that reflects their experiences and gives them a voice. And I hope that the book offers both Western and Eastern moms ways to learn from each other and blend the best of American and Asian approaches to parenting and education.

Exam Fever: A Double Edged Sword

This year, I'm teaching 3 groups of twelfth graders, and they're all in the process of preparing for their final IB exams. The tension in the room is often palpable, and our conversations seem to revolve around these ominous upcoming exams. We speak about criteria, rubrics, exam prep, revisions, past papers ... the tedious and exhausting language of exams. And the truth of the matter is, I'm experiencing intense exam anxiety and fatigue.

I'm starting to wonder about the point of all this.

What happened to poetry? What happened to intense discussions about literature and life? What happened to the love of learning? What happened to kids reading for pleasure? And what are the costs of making kids feel as though not just their futures, but their self worth, depends on the outcome of an exam?

Exams do have their benefits. As I've argued in the past, they force teachers to teach to mastery (as opposed to mere exposure), and they hold everyone -- teachers and students -- accountable for student learning. They also teach kids to cope with stress and pressure, and students certainly learn a lot about self-discipline and the subject-matter itself as they move through the process.

When I taught in the US and didn't have the pressure of an external exam, I do think that more kids fell through the cracks; it was easy for kids to just move from one grade to the next without really mastering skills or content, or without really being held accountable for their learning. And of course, teachers could do pretty much what they wanted -- a little grade inflation here, a lack of rigor there, and no one would be any the wiser because there was no external, objective exam board evaluating your students' skills. Teachers could just say things like," Every child learns at his own pace" and move the kids along. And no one would know or care that the kid couldn't really write a sentence to save his life. Without external exams, there was no pressing need to confront and deal with a student's academic gaps and failings.

But, exams also have a high opportunity cost, don't they? When we spend so much time teaching to a test, we lose time that could be devoted to cultivating a deep and abiding love of learning. And could we (and this is a thought that frightens me) even be killing a student's sense of creativity and individuality? After all, exams expect one answer -- the right answer -- and there's very little room for divergent thinking, originality, and out-of-the-box approaches. You're better off with a formulaic approach, if your goal is acing an exam where the examiner is expected to grade according to strict rubrics and criteria. In fact, in many ways, exams are the antithesis of creativity.

So, here I am, faced with a strange dilemma: I want my students to do really well on these exams. And I want the satisfaction of knowing that my students have mastered crucial skills that they will need for life -- critical reading skills, control over language, an ability to craft a well-structured and convincing argument, the ability to appreciate and analyze literature and literary techniques.
And yet, I also want to feel as though I'm firing these kids up, inspiring them to love language and literature, giving them the freedom to discover and express their innermost selves, and helping them become passionate readers and learners.

Are these goals mutually exclusive? When we prep kids for exams and create an exam/achievement culture for our kids, do we inevitably sacrifice that creativity and inspiration? Or can teachers strive to do both: teach skill mastery for exams and also fire-up passion?

 I think the solution lies in poetry.

I want to turn to poetry for sustenance. Food for the soul. The more intense the focus on exams become, the more determined I am to begin my lessons with poetry, with "thoughts that breathe and words that burn," so that my students can spend some time at the beginning of each class feeling intellectually moved and energized. We can share poems, they can write poems, we can seek and appreciate the beauty around us. And then, perhaps, when we go back to the skills and the texts that will be tested, we can focus not just on the upcoming exams, but also the learning involved and the beauty of language.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

- Dead Poets Society

* thoughts that breathe, and words that burn...Thomas Gray

Asian versus Western Parental Demands: A Deepening Rift?

I recently read this really interesting article in the NY Times on a school district in the US, where parental opinions on curriculum and academic pressure are severely divided along racial lines. Apparently, the White parents in this particular school are pressuring the school to reduce academic competition and pressure, while Asian parents, mostly immigrants, are anxious that the school will then be reducing standards, "dumbing down education," and preventing their children from excelling academically.

Here are some interesting extracts from the article:

"On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.

“What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.

About 10 minutes from Princeton and an hour and a half from New York City, West Windsor and Plainsboro have become popular bedroom communities for technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers, drawn in large part by the public schools. From the last three graduating classes, 16 seniors were admitted to M.I.T. It churns out Science Olympiad winners, classically trained musicians and students with perfect SAT scores.

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

They have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s reforms. (bolding mine)"

The article was intriguing, and in some ways it mirrors the discussions I have with parents here in Singapore as well. International schools in Singapore often have a fairly even split between White and Asian families, and this demographic often creates a sort of split personality for the school, pulling it in two entirely different directions. Asian parents tend to want more "academic rigor," whereas Western parents worry that the programs are becoming too competitive and rigorous for their children.

Is it possibly for schools to address the concerns while still maintaining respect for both cultural attitudes towards parenting and education? Also, how can schools run by European and American faculty and administrators become more sensitive to the ways in which Asians view education and parenting? Perhaps the answer is to engage in more cross-cultural dialogue so that both sides actually talk to each other and learn from each other-- taking one side or another seems to be a recipe for disaster, as it will inevitably alienate half the school's population.

Adolescents, Depression, Suicide, and other troubling trends

Here's a recent article from the Atlantic on teenage suicides in Palo Alto. It got me thinking about my own students and about the stresses that teenagers in high achieving, competitive urban schools face. In the last few years, I've seen a number of students suffer from different mental illnesses: depression, self-harming, anxiety, eating disorders, and even thoughts of suicide. I've often wondered whether the pace and the level of stimulation that I deal with at my current school is sustainable -- on many occasions, I've thought that we humans are not designed to do so much and to hold ourselves to such high expectations. It's just too exhausting.

Here are some of the issues that I think affect teens (and perhaps adults as well).

1. Over stimulation or Hyper stimulation: There are only so many hours in a day and there is only so much that our minds and our bodies can absorb and deal with on a daily basis. When we have days of non-stop activity, coupled with information overload and incessant sensory stimulation, our bodies and brains become over-stressed. If this continues on a daily basis without breaks, then our bodies and brains literally fray and break down.
Possible antidotes: Limit technology, more time to do nothing (down time), more time in nature, more quiet time and rest

2. Loneliness and Isolation: With parents working longer hours and spending more time on laptops and phones, kids are increasingly disconnected from their parents. Our kids need real conversations, close conversations, with their parents. They need to feel loved, cared for, and valued -- not just for their grades and their performances, but for who they are as people. I have too many students who feel isolated from everyone -- they don't feel close to their parents, and they don't have a close network of friends whom they can really trust. As parents, we can't solve their friendship problems, but we can be there for them to let them know that they are loved.
Possible antidotes: Put away those phones and spend time talking and relaxing with your kids. Stay close to your children, and make sure that grandparents and extended family members are around as well. Maybe also get a pet.

3. Pressure, competition, and a deep sense of  inadequacy: My students often tell me that they feel stressed and anxious about grades and college admissions; they feel as though they're working as hard as they possibly can, and yet they're still not getting the grades that they want (or that their parents want). Much of this pressure is self-inflicted - it's not necessarily coming from the school or from the parents -- but the fact is that kids are feeling it. And often they feel it intensely.
Possible antidotes: Conversations to help kids keep things in perspective. Mindfulness, yoga, and time in nature  -- all ways to help teens recenter and think about what is really important.

4. Exhaustion: When I walk into my twelfth grade classes, my students inevitably look exhausted. When I cheerily ask them how they're doing, their response is almost always, "We're so tired." They never seem to get enough sleep. Whether this is because of the work load, or because of social media/gaming/ and other distractions, the fact of the matter is that a lack of sleep is clearly correlated with mood disorders. Our kids need sleep. And we need to make sure that they eat and sleep in healthy ways.

When I feel the pressure and pace of life in Singapore wear me down, I often wonder if it's healthy for kids to grow up in environments where the bar is set so high -- too high, perhaps. Maybe if we all do less, and worry less about doing everything so spectacularly well, we will all be happier? Sometimes I watch my students -- their exhaustion, their stress -- and I contemplate moving out of the city to the mountains. I don't think that our bodies and minds are built for the high tech, competitive, fast-paced, urban lifestyle that we've created for ourselves. I think that our biology and psychology are at odds with the world we've created, and the costs of this misalignment can be very high indeed.

The Choices Moms Make - Part 2

I recently wrote this post about the Mom Wars, or the tension that exists between working moms and stay-at-home moms. And this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, particularly as I'm investing increasing amounts of time in my own career and finding that I have less time to actively parent my own children.

Here are some scenarios I've encountered in my teaching career:

A few years ago, I had a student who was terribly depressed. Despite being a bright and creative kid, this boy practically failed my class and most of his other classes. He often looked sick to me -- he coughed a lot, he often put his head down in class and zoned out, and he once told me that he suffered from deep anxiety. Despite numerous email exchanges with his mom, I never once met her in person. She and her husband both had jobs where they travelled extensively, and neither of them was ever at home with their son. So, he spent his time with his laptop and his ipad. The housekeeper made sure he was fed, but beyond that, he was left to his own devices (pun intended).

I remember thinking, quite judgmentally (and perhaps unfairly?), that if he were my son, I would have quit work and stayed at home to help him. He needed his mom. Who knows what the situation in the family was like. All I could tell, from my vantage point, was that this kid needed a whole lot more care than he was getting.

And here's another scenario - but a different one.

Some years ago, when I was teaching in Boston at a very elite all-girls school, I had a mom call me up and tell me that her daughter, who was in my advisory group, was trying out for a part in the school play and "she just had to get that part because her self-esteem was very low, and not getting that part would be devastating for her." I explained to the mom that I had nothing to do with the drama department, and that they would pick the girl who deserved the role most.  The mom argued with me vehemently, and finally threw a veiled threat at me: "We've given the school a lot of money. And if you really want to help my daughter, you certainly can." I was shaken. So I told my principal. She shook her head, sighed, and then declared, "That woman really needs a job!"

I agreed. Some moms live through their children in a way that it destructive for the mom, for the kids, and for everyone else involved.

So, coming back to the question I posed earlier: What's a mom to do?

There are obviously no right or easy answers here. But perhaps we women need to introspect deeply about the choices we make so that we can be the best possible mothers and also feel really good about ourselves. At different stages in our children's lives, and in our own lives, we may need to make different choices. Sometimes, mothering may need to take center stage. And at other times, work and outside interests may need to take center stage. Mothering in the 21st century is a balancing act in every sense of the word, and striking the right balance is never easy.

The Mom Wars Revisited: The Choices We Make

A conversation in a group of working moms from a recent party:

One mom says, "Oh, Gosh, those housewives. I swear, they have nothing better to do. They love creating more unnecessary work for working moms. They always want to organize more volunteer events at school, more class parties, more social events, more playdates. I can't stand it!"
The other working moms in the group laughed and commiserated about how they have so much to do at work and so little time or patience for stay-at-home moms. I found myself laughing at this mom's outrage, despite my own appreciation for all the volunteer work that so many class moms do. Truth be told, I often find myself scrambling to keep up with the moms who are very involved at school, and my kids keep complaining that I don't volunteer in their classrooms.

And another conversation with a friend of mine, a stay-at-home-mom with two kids.

My friend says, "I love having time with my own kids. This time when they're young is so precious, and it's so fulfilling to be able to be there for them and raise them well. I really don't know how XXX, (a working mom with long hours and a job that includes travel) does it. I would find it so difficult if I had so little time with my kids." I nodded - honestly, I would also find a job with really long hours and lots of travel very challenging. In fact, I often find it challenging to balance parenting with my own job, which has decent hours and no travel.

I've thought a lot about the dilemmas that mothers in busy urban centers contend with. If they stay-at-home with their kids, they risk feeling undervalued, dependent, and marginalized by their peers  and their spouses who work. They may feel as though they lack intellectual stimulation, and they may begin to lose confidence in their own abilities. Their world may shrink, in some sense of the word.

On the other hand, if they work full-time, they spend much less time with their own children, and they risk feeling guilty about the costs to their kids. Particularly if the kids are struggling in some way -- either emotionally, behaviorally, or academically. The fact of the matter is that kids do benefit from time with their parents, and whether we want to admit it or not, children -- infants, toddlers, young kids and even teens -- need large chunks of time with their mothers.

So what's a mom to do?

The fact of the matter is that there are very real costs to whatever decision a woman makes when she has kids. And at present, society exacerbates and intensifies these dilemmas in the following ways:

- It undervalues caregiving roles, which tend to be private and non self-promotional -- so women (and men) who spend their lives caring for others are devalued and exploited.

- It overvalues "public" roles -- so men (and women) who work in the public realm get far more credit, praise, and positive reinforcement from society than those who don't.

- It doesn't expect dads to pull their weight on the home front, so overwhelmingly, working women still have to contend with the second shift, where they come home and immediately move into the mom role. Most of the working women I know, even the ones who are super successful, still end up being the primary parent-in-charge of things such as supervising homework and putting kids to bed. If the mom can't do it, then it's left to the nanny.

- It promotes the myth that the woman can do it all and no one will suffer - not the mom herself, not her kids, not her family. This just isn't true. Women who work full-time and take care of their kids feel chronically overwhelmed and exhausted, particularly when the kids are young. Furthermore, infants and toddlers and even older kids often suffer when their moms aren't around enough. They need "quantity time" together, not just occasional "quality time."

So can a mom do it all without any costs? Not really. Here's Anne-Marie Slaughter's wonderful essay on the myth of moms having it all.

Why Don't Kids in Singapore Read?

As I'm wrapping up with the school term, I'm also gearing up to publicize my new book, Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age. Today, I spoke with Michelle Martin on 938 Live (Singapore) about my book; the conversation will be aired soon on her show WOW: Women of Worth.

One of the things we talked about was the lack of a reading culture in Singapore. Why don't families here prioritize reading? If Singapore really wants to be an intellectual nation, then reading has to be at the center of children's lives.

Why aren't kids reading? Well, for one thing, the exam system doesn't reward reading for pleasure, so some parents see free reading as an indulgence instead of a necessity. The benefits of reading aren't immediately apparent, and they aren't easily quantifiable and measurable. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.

But, on the bright side, I've met a lot of wonderful people in Singapore who are working hard to change the way families think about reading. Michelle has a talk show called "Talking Books with Michelle," and the National Book Council runs a number of reading-related events including the annual Asian Festival of Children's Content (AFCC), which celebrates Asian children's literature. And the libraries on the island are fantastic.

So I'm optimistic. There's so much great children's literature out there, and there are a whole host of promising new Asian writers, so hopefully, families will begin to see the value of reading. I honestly can't imagine my life and my home without books. They have enriched my life so much, and they are so central to everything I do. As an educator, inspiring kids to love reading is a central part of my job. And creating a reading culture in my home is one of the most pleasurable aspects of parenting. Anna Quindlen captured my feelings beautifully when she said, "Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are home."

Children's Books 2015 and why we still need fiction

Wanted to share the New York Times Notable Children's Books for 2015. Some good holiday reading!

Also, I recently read this post on EdWeek about how American schools are teaching more non-fiction and less fiction. While I love non-fiction, and I'm all for kids reading a wide range of genres and building their knowledge base, I don't like the idea of sacrificing fiction.

Why do our kids still need fiction?
Because, most importantly, it helps us understand what it means to be human.

Here's what I say in Beyond the Tiger Mom:

Books, stories, and poetry are part of our shared humanity; they help us understand and make sense of the human experience. Across time and place, in a wide range of languages, humans have been telling stories, crafting poems, singing songs, and expressing their deepest feelings and fears through the spoken and written word. While our technologies and lifestyles may have changed unrecognizably over the last millennia, the words of Kabir and Kalidas, Li Bao and Cao Xueqin, Milton and Shakespeare still resonate today – a broken heart then is not unlike a broken heart now; the ache and longing of love one thousand years ago is much the same as the ache and longing of love today.

I have so many memories of intense and moving reading experiences as a child and a teenager. I remember clearly my induction into the world of readers. One hot summer in Chennai, when I was almost seven years old, the sun filtered through the leaves of the mango tree outside our house and glinted off the pages of my book. I sat with my back against the trunk of the tree, reading each page with studied concentration. I held my breath, my heart pounding in my chest, as I wondered whether or not Joe, Beth and Frannie would ever escape from the clutches of Dame Snap. The children had climbed up the ladder to one of the magical lands at the top of the Faraway tree, and they had, unfortunately, gotten trapped in a terrible land.  Would they find their way out? Every day that summer, I retreated to the shade of the mango tree and read. Every night, I fell asleep dreaming about magical lands and fantastical adventures. By the end of my summer vacation, I had finished reading The Folk of the Faraway Tree, my first chapter book, and I had become a reader.

Now, as a parent and teacher, I feel a sense of deja-vu as I watch my own children and students enter the world of books and stories. When my eight year old son laughs out loud as he reads about the terrible fate of Augustus Gloop, that “big fat nincompoop” in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I am reminded of the humor and laughter of childhood reading. When my five year old daughter begs me to read her one more chapter from Charlotte’s Web, I am reminded of the way books draw us into their worlds, allowing us to imagine all kinds of possibilities. And when one of my ninth graders clutches The Kite Runner tightly in his hands and tells me that he has never loved a book so much, I am reminded again of the power of books and words to move us, literally, to tears.

As a parent, there are plenty of reasons to surround your child with books and provide your child with the space and time to read, read, read. When you see your son or daughter curled up in bed with a book, don’t dismiss it as a waste of time. That time is precious. Your child is learning more than you know.

7 Life Lessons: What I've Learned Along the Way

Here's a letter I wrote to for my students who graduated. I miss them!

Life’s Lessons: A letter to my students

Graduations remind me of diving boards: parents and teachers become spectators, waiting to see each student jump, spring, and dive into “adulthood” and the “real world.” And we teachers believe, perhaps naively, that we’ve prepared you for the real world. We’ve given you formulas and algorithms, we’ve introduced you to Orwell and Bronte, we’ve taught you about wars and revolutions, we’ve taught you to read, write, speak, and sing…. We’ve prepared you for that dive.

But in reality, there isn’t a dive that sends you into the pool of adulthood. Growing up isn’t as sudden or as simple as that. It’s a life-long journey, and for the most part, you swim along just as you did in high school. But -- perhaps not unlike the way your heart sank when you bombed a test, or the way you cried when your friend betrayed you, or the way you tossed in bed wondering if your crush would ever be reciprocated -- you might sometimes feel as though you can’t swim fast enough, or the pool seems too long and too deep to navigate, or you lose your way and hit your head on the pool walls, and ouch, it hurts.

As you navigate the complex world of independence and adulthood, I’d like to share with you some of the lessons that I learned along the way. These lessons may or may not resonate with you – but I offer them to you anyways, with all my best wishes and best intentions.

I have learned to empathize more and judge less. Everyone has challenges of some kind – sometimes heartbreaking challenges – so judge people less, empathize with them more, and be kind, be kind, be kind.

I have learned that forgiveness is always better than anger. Forgiveness is liberating, but anger is imprisoning.

As the poet Jallaludin Rumi reminds us,

“Anger may taste sweet, but it kills.

Don’t become its victim.

You need humility to climb to freedom.”

I have learned that when we skin our knees on the sidewalks of life*, we bleed, whether we’re rich or poor, gay or straight, Jew or Christian, Hindu or Muslim, Black or White, Indian or Chinese. I hope that as you venture into a world where people define themselves by how they are different from others, often with violence and hatred, you will remember our common humanity.

I have learned that there is value in sticking things out: sticking out relationships, jobs, places, and projects. In a world with so much mobility and so many choices, this can be harder than it seems. Continuity and commitment, endurance and perseverance, or “grit”  -- to use the word of the day -- all matter. We need our roots as much as we need our wings.

I have learned that you’re never quite prepared for those moments when adversity hits – when the pool feels too deep and the currents too strong, when you feel as though you may drown, or worse, you yearn to drown, when you are hit with loss or betrayal or failure or terrifying fear. But, prepared or not, you have to keep swimming and stay strong. Don’t fall apart when life gets tough; be resilient and brave.

I have learned that it is important to nurture relationships – to make an effort with people you care about and people you work with. Stay close to your families, nurture your friendships, and cultivate your professional networks. Give gifts, attend your friends’ weddings (even if they’re far away and it’s inconvenient), go to their baby showers, be there for them when things go wrong, reach out often and stay in touch. In a globalized world where people are scattered everywhere, like raindrops, relationships may start to feel ephemeral and transient. Make the effort; you will be grateful for all those relationships – familial, personal, and professional -- down the road.

I have learned that it is important to cultivate your own intellectual life. Your mind is rich and wonderful – nourish it and care for it. Knowledge and imagination, books and ideas, can enrich and sustain you. Like fire and energy, like a bird in flight and a mountain climber scaling heights, the life of the mind is thrilling. Read widely, read deeply, and read often.

Take care of yourselves always.

Ms.T

* "when we skin our knees on the sidewalks of life, we bleed" - Taken from Billy Collins' wonderful poem "On Turning Ten."