Inspired by the Top 50 Reasons Professional Athletes Remain Wealthy. Push back on these, or add your own.

1. They recognize the difficulty of their position–that they must work both within and against an oppressive system–and refuse to take this out on students.
2. They take care of themselves first, or, if they choose not to, they do not embrace martyrdom.
3. They don’t take advice about teaching from people who complain.
4. They work at schools whose values and behaviors resonate with their own values and behaviors.
5. They own their curriculum.
6. Regarding their practices, they would rather be good than right.
7. They hone core practices–establishing trust, designing learning experiences, cultivating high expectations–and know that they can apply these practices in almost any setting.
8. They facilitate learning by listening more than they talk.
9. They value coherence over alignment.
10. They see every student as a leader.

All the Rest

Peter Matthiesen’s In Paradise, about a Zen meditation retreat at concentration camps in Poland, in which retreatants attempt to reckon with the horror, honor the victims, and/or simply pay witness. Hearty recommendation. At one point, some retreatants spontaneously dance, which causes bitterness and acrimony. One novitiate attendee considered it cathartic:

And yes, [the dance] must have been authentic: in her opinion, those who joined in with an open heart had been those most open to this whole experience of the death camp, transported by compassion to the same degree that they were truly penetrated by the horror.

p. 174

Currently working on African Silences, by the same author.

Here’s the first sentence of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines:

In Alice Springs – a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.

The Songlines is structurally innovative and enjoyable to read. Spoiler alert: he concludes that, for humans, travelling is genetically encoded:

What I learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.

And just one more:

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence: The flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.

Notice how the end of that line becomes iambic, with internal rhyming, transforming what the Brazilians call saudade into beauty?

Currently re-reading The Art of Coaching; incredibly helpful for my work. Happy Halloween!