“That I was kind and caring and somewhat intelligent. That I was willing to listen. And that I was not only willing to talk, but I was willing to do. That I worked my best to improve conditions for everyone in the state.”
David Brooks talks of “eulogy virtues,” what’s talked about at your funeral, as opposed to “resume virtues,” what’s talked about in your job interview.
Olene Walker’s Salt Lake Tribuneobituary gave us the opportunity to discuss what we’d like people to say about us 100 years from now.
Her obituary taught us affable, fortitude, persona, and discombobulation. We also learned from it why flags are flown at half-staff, and what it means to clean someone’s clock.
Three reasons we read three obituaries for children’s author Brian Jacques:
To meet Common Core State Standard RI.6.9: “Compare and contrast one author’s presentation of events with that of another (e.g., a memoir written by and a biography on the same person).”
Aged 10, he was told to write a story about animals and turned in a tale about a bird that cleaned a crocodile’s teeth. His teacher refused to believe that a boy so young could write so imaginatively and caned Brian when he insisted he had not copied it.
Mr. Jacques (pronounced “Jakes”), who grew up near the docks of Liverpool, left school at 15 and found work as a merchant mariner. He later worked as a railway fireman, long-haul trucker, bus driver, postmaster, longshoreman, police constable and stand-up comic.
On his route was the Royal School for the Blind. Invited in for a nice cup of tea one day, he volunteered to read to the students. Over time, he grew dissatisfied with the books available — too much adolescent angst, he later said — and vowed to write his own.
Nohemi Gonzalez was murdered in the 2015 massacres in Paris.
The only daughter of an immigrant mother, Nohemi pursued her studies in industrial design, worked as a teaching assistant and shop technician, and held a job at an Armani Exchange. Her professor called her “an absolute delight.”
Reading about Ms. Gonzalez introduced our 6th graders to one of higher education’s best features, the opportunity to study abroad.
After reading this lovely profile, students shared where they’d like to go: Spain and France ranked high, as did Ireland; other destinations included Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, and Greece.
Most of the obituaries we read each week are not heartbreaking; this one was. Rest in peace, Nohemi. May your life be an inspiration.
“People kept thinking, ‘Oh, we can catch kids up later,’ and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language.”
Betty Hart is one of my heroes. Thanks to her, we know this:
It is an unhappy fact that you can fairly accurately predict whether kids will graduate from high school by looking at their third grade reading scores. As Robert Pondiscio says:
I can think of no more urgent priority for K–12 education than getting as many children as possible to the starting line as readers by third grade. If that’s not a make-or-break issue for kids, it’s damn close.
Teaching vocabulary* is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job, so I’d do it anyway, but it’s because of Ms. Hart’s work that I do it with such urgency. And I bet she’d be pleased that her own obituary provides such a splendid array. The words we learned were: disparity, deficit, prevalent, transcribe, welfare, cumulative, touchstone, and jargon.
She’d also be delighted that one student, studying the chart, asked (unprompted) this astute question: “But what if poor parents talked to their kids more [than wealthy parents]?”** The title of a recent Washington Post article sums it up: “The most powerful thing we could give poor kids is completely free.”
In her honor, each student selected one of the above vocabulary words and created a (jargon-free) poster that could explain its meaning to a child.
*Shop talk: Bringing Words to Life taught me how to teach vocabulary. If my teaching bookshelf were on fire, that’s the book I’d grab.
**This led to a good discussion about averages, in which I emphasized that one could not conclude from the chart what all poor, working-class, or rich families do. In the course of this digression, we determined by how much my presence in the classroom raised its average age (noticeably), and we talked about how a visit from LeBron James would raise our average dunking skill and wealth.
“She always gave back to the community, quietly and effectively.”
I asked my students this question: “What do people who live elsewhere think of when they think of Boston?”
Responses included the city’s distinctive accent, Revolutionary War history, and strong sports culture.
When I asked if there were any negative associations, however, the only suggestion – to our great amusement – was “dirty water.” Boston’s former notoriety for racial division was unknown.
In fairness, I didn’t know about it either when I was a 6th grader.
Moreover, that painful history wouldn’t be obvious from looking at the students, who look a lot like the city. Our classroom’s diversity is a tribute to the work of Ruth Batson, whose Boston Globeobituary we read together.
