Tag Archives: leadership

What Have I Learned

Posted on August 14, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I engaged in several virtual and face-to-face conversations over the past week about what learning and education should look like today. Gary Snyder summarized some of this in this thoughtful poem. I believe we need to focus more on the tools children need than the content. That is not to say content is not important. It must stretch, challenge, and allow growth.

Curriculum has narrowed, become content, and the use of tools. It does not always focus on the proper use of tools and development of habits, skills, attitudes, practices, dispositions, etc. What role does discernment play in today’s schools? What eloquent questions, with no presumption of answers, are teachers and students alike asked? Content, in the form of knowledge and information, becomes the currency of the realm and wise application is often pushed aside. 21st Century education requires a mindful approach. An approach that recognizes the changing of the flowers in each moment.

What have I learned but

the proper use for several tools?

The moments

between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,

and think my own kind

of crusty dry thoughts.

–the first Calochortus flowers

and in all the land,

it’s spring.

I point them out:

the yellow petals, the golden hairs,

to Gen.

Seeing in silence:

never the same twice,

but when you get it right,

you pass it on.

19 Comments

Posted in 21st Century Education, Education, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged 21st Century Education, creativity, education, eloquent questions, Gary Snyder, leadership, Mindful Practice, poetry, stewardship, teacher as transformer, What Have I Learned. Bookmark the permalink.

I Am Much Too Alone in the World, and not Alone Enough

Posted on June 3, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

Today, I talked with students whose main concern about school is they do not like it. One thing I gleaned was a reluctance to accept personal responsibility which should be something students learn in school. There are reasons for this lack of responsibility. One that is overlooked is responsibility is taken away from children.

What made this an interesting conversation was some of these students are ‘special needs’. In many ways they are bright, articulate problem-solvers frustrated by a system that has failed them leaving them to feel as if they were failing. They see school as a place they have to go and not a place of learning.

What was disconcerting is I am told just get them these students through the system. These children are someone else’s problem next year. We shuffle these students from school to school in this fashion, in effect sorted out of the failed system. Educators, politicians, and bureaucrats fail them daily.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this poem and it reminded me of one thing humans want in life: free will and to be part of conversations about them in honest ways. School is not a game played with unrevealed rules, but a place of learning. What if adults took time, listened to children, and helped them find the path where we each learn new words each day?

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother’s face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

20 Comments

Posted in Community, Education, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry and tagged creativity, education, Educational Leadership, eloquent questions, I Am Much Too Alone in the World and not Alone Enough, leadership, Mindful Practice, poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, stewardship, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

To Look at Any Thing

Posted on June 1, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I have had a rare opportunity in life to be a teacher. The pinnacle was being a teacher at Stony Creek. I knew what it meant to be a teacher. I had several conversations today about what we share with each other. John Moffitt wrote this beautiful poem. I interpret part of the poem as being the need be present and share our stories. Teachers and hockey coaches can make a difference in children’s lives. I need to be vulnerable. Parker Palmer suggested teachers live at the most dangerous intersection of personal and private life. I will miss that aspect of the classroom. I got to be a teacher. I got to know what that meant, because I looked at it and lived it as fully. It brought peace to my life.

To look at any thing,

If you would know that thing,

You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say,

‘I have seen spring in these

Woods,’ will not do–you must

Be the thing you see:

You must be the dark snakes of

Stems and ferny plumes of leaves

You must enter in

To the small silences between

The leaves,

You must take your time

And touch the very peace

They issue from.

9 Comments

Posted in Community, Education, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged creativity, education, John Moffitt, leadership, Mindful Practice, poetry, teacher as transformer, To Look at Any Thing. Bookmark the permalink.

What I Have Learned So Far

Posted on May 1, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I wonder if I do enough. Is there more that I can do? Certainly, I discover the seed Mary Oliver referred to in quiet moments of meditation. What can I do so it grows and I move beyond indolence? Yesterday, a former student visited. He is a success story in my career, a young man who was disengaging from school in late elementary. His parents supported our efforts and the result was a high school graduate, a married man with two children, and he is headed to Africa for work.

He reminded me through his visit that I had done more than talk the good story. We sowed the seed and it flourished.

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

17 Comments

Posted in Education, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, education, eloquent questions, leadership, Mary Oliver, Mindful Practice, poetry, teacher as transformer, What I Have Learned So Far. Bookmark the permalink.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Posted on March 27, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I slowed down since we arrived in Phoenix. I feel like this when I travel to Spokane. It takes a few days, but eventually I move slower, take time to look around, and smell the proverbial roses.

I read Nicholas Carr‘s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains and found unexpected inspiration. I chose the book as part of the course and dissertation preparation. Carr used poetry to support some of his ideas. He included Wallace Stevens’ poem about immersing one’s self into reading, the solitude found there, and the world that emerges. The author speaks to me as I find calm and solitude.

People commented on the re-blog, Solitude, about a concern for children and an inability to disconnect from digital technologies. I agree and it is partly what motivates me in my dissertation path. Where I teach and learn, I see readers. It is a pastime supported by many families and embraced by many children. Many families limit technology use and television viewing in their homes. Many students play musical instruments, join choirs, and enjoy the arts. It is a concern, but there are examples of children and families mindfully using technology.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

The world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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I pastori (The Shepherds)

Posted on March 14, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I might have posted this lovely poem by Gabrielle D’Annunzio in September as I began school, but it speaks to me. Perhaps, I am better off to read it at other times than the beginning.

I recalled the poem, when I heard of the election of the Pope, Francis I. I thought it was a fitting name for the person who would be a shepherd. I hope he fulfills his Jesuit tradition of social justice and teaching.

When I heard the name he chose, it reminded of St. Francis of Assisi. Kathy and I used the Prayer of St. Francis as part of our wedding ceremony and hangs on our bedroom wall.

September, let’s go. It’s time to migrate.

Now in the land of Abruzzi my shepherds

leave the folds and go towards the sea:

they go down to the wild Adriatic

that is green like mountain pastures.

They’ve drunk deeply from the Alpine fonts,

so that the taste of their native water

may stay in their exiled hearts for comfort

to deceive their thirst along the way.

They’ve renewed their hazelnut sticks.

And they go along the ancient bridleway,

that is almost like a silent grassy river

in the traces of the ancient ancestors.

Oh voice of the one who first

discerns the shimmering of the sea!

Now along this coast moves the flock.

Without movement is the air.

The sun bleaches the living wool so that

it almost blends into the sand.

Swishing, stamping, sweet sounds.

Ah why am I not with my shepherds?

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You Reading This, Be Ready

Posted on March 5, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

Recently, I attended a presentation and the person commented, “The only now we have is this one right here.” I began to use this with students. In the busyness of life, what do I want to remember? If I am present, right here, now, I can see the extraordinary aspects of the world I live in the now. I bring my mind into the room and it joins the shell, my body. William Stafford shared this Zen-like view of the world in this poem.

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

27 Comments

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Preface to Leaves of Grass

Posted on March 2, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I re-blogged Distraction and Love yesterday. John posted it originally at What is Real True Love? He followed up to comment and left a long, wonderful comment with quotes. What distracts us? I only ask and answer that question when I have the space and solitude. It is in those moments that I can hold my questions and have enough compassion to receive the answers. I was led to this passage by Walt Whitman from John’s comments. I gently question my facts and truths, learned throughout my life in the quiet of meditation and prayer.

I love his beard and hair. When I grow up, I might look like him. I hope to find the wisdom Whitman spoke of so eloquently. Enjoy.

“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote you income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take your hat off to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Posted on February 26, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

This is not the poem. I chose a part that speaks to me deeply. I tend to be a bit of rebel. I know it hard to believe, but I am always willing, when others are not, to shake up the things as they are. T. S. Eliot said it so well: “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” I find comfort some days in the power of that question. What in my universe needs to be disturbed? Even as I grow older, what does wisdom call on me to do that ruffles my feathers and those around me?

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea…

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

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A Path for Warriors

Posted on February 9, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I commented I finished Margaret Wheatley‘s book, So Far From Home. She concluded with a beautiful poem. It reminded how importance quiet and mindful moments are. I was less rushed these last couple of days and it was like a digital sabbath.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote: “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

My mother used to teach us about being Soldiers of Christ. We walk in the “same steps as Christ” (2 Corinthians 12:18, 1 Peter 2:21). We “[pray] always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18), and “open your mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel” (Ephesians 6:19). Soldiers, in this context, seek peace from within and quiet the mind so their actions and words parallel each other.

We are grateful to discover our right work and happy to be engaged in it.

We embody values and practices that offer us meaningful lives now.

We let go of needing to impact the future.

We refrain from adding to the aggression, fear and confusion of this time.

We welcome every opportunity to practice our skills of compassion and insight, even very challenging ones.

We resist seeking the illusory comfort of certainty and stability.

We delight when our work achieves good results yet let go of needing others to adopt our successes.

We know that all problems have complex causes. We do not place blame on any one person or cause, including ourselves and colleagues.

We are vigilant with our relationships, mindful to counteract the polarizing dynamics of this time.

Our actions embody our confidence that humans can get through anything as long as we’re together.

We stay present to the world as it is with open minds and hearts, knowing this nourishes our gentleness, decency and bravery.

We care for ourselves as tenderly as we care for others, taking time for rest, reflection and renewal.