Gnarly.
When I was still teaching, students would throw around their favourite slang, usually in proper ways. Gnarly was a favourite word of one of the young men I taught for five years.
A young woman used beast. The first time I heard her say that I was unsure what she meant, but it described her play as the Michael Jordan of her basketball league.
Mike photographed a tree and entitled the post Gnarly. It is cool which is what the young man meant when he used gnarly. It is cool there is wisdom in that tree as it does its work. It is also cool to find wisdom in the everyday world of words.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Totally.
Gnarly.
How about Acceptance
So much more than the letters
There is wisdom in acceptance. It suggests an open space where we receive the other.
Open space, so acceptance allows space, a pause, a time when we could decide not to take action, mental,or physical.
Acceptance may mean that we need not achieve, accomplish, defeat anyone or anything
It may mean let go and be totally here, now
That is a space to ponder
Jacques Derrida commented in French, where the word for difference and deference are the same word, difference calls on us to defer and open a space for the strange/different to enter.
Cultures may I sat differ that way
Buddhist do not have some English words or concepts
The same is the case from language to language. I find English an impoverished language at times. I like the nuanced and complex interpreting found in other languages,cultures, and diverse spiritual beliefs.
Your the rxpert
I try not to think of myself that way. Living is a one-moment-at-a-time process which is always revealing what it is.
Your a great teacher, it is called humility, balance, perspective and wisdom
Very nice Ivon
Thank you Marty.
I remember ‘cool, man’ and ‘awesome’ being slang, but haven’t heard ‘gnarly’ for a long time… smiles!
I only heard it in movies and from that young man.
Gnarly reminds me of my So.Cal. teenage years and hearing the surfer dudes talk about wanting to catch a gnarly wave. Nice memories. 🙂
I am not sure how it made up to Alberta where there is no surfing.
Reminds , I should have kept a log of the evolution of slang words to mean the same concept over 33 years in the classroom. “cool” still remains though.
Some words endure, others fade for a while and return, and others fade away completely.
A lovely, lovely post! I’ll never hear ‘gnarly’ the same again! 🙂
Thank you. Young people keep us young.