yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Yesterday I woke up thinking we'd probably be talking about immigration.  Then the social media thing, and the media coverage, and the fear, and the parents taking their children out of school. 

Now it's a sunny, quiet Saturday morning.  This is a perfect moment to reflect and ask myself what we can learn from moments like this.

There's a longer blog post cooking in my head, but for our purposes I want to bookmark a few ideas so we can come back to them after the weekend:

• The vast majority of people on our campus do the right thing almost all the time, even when no one is looking;
• This is not a very dramatic story, so the evening news doesn't often scream: "This just in!  Everything went right at Santa Maria High School today, and young people learned stuff!"
• There is something truly beautiful about community, and maybe moments like this can bring us back in closer touch with our needs for trust and hope;
• I subscribe to the idea that tomorrow is promised to no one (remembering the idea helps me make the most of today), but going to school should never feel like a risk or a potential threat to our safety;
• This sort of thing has happened before (see below, which I originally posted for a class at Righetti HS on November 20, 2014);
• A question for all of us to consider: How can we use our growing understanding of rhetoric and communication to tell a different, better story that sets the tone we want to see in our community?

I look forward to thinking out loud with you about these ideas.  In the meantime, please feel free to comment. Mahalo. -dp
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(From 2014)

Sometimes life is our literature.  Yesterday, this happened:

So, today we'll be creating space for any discussion that needs discussing, and we will be integrating our ideas about reality with our ideas about poetry.

For starters: an exercise in Remix and "the medium is the message."  Watching the news visual with each of today's tunes: "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen & "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones

JOURNAL TOPIC:
As author Salman Rushdie put it, "A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."  Write a poem about yesterday's events, or what you think it says about our culture and the people in it, or anything else that fulfills Rushdie's description of the poet's work.